Analysis of privacy and security issues in android pre-installed applications

Since Android is an open-source operating system, systems can be modified by manufacturers and new software can be put to systems. Even if, this is a disquieting situation in terms of user privacy and security, number of studies that comprehensively analyze pre-installed applications on systems is limited. In this thesis, a dataset of pre-installed applications has been created and made publicly available to fulfill the gap in this area is introduced. Also, Tracker SDKs, permissions, some manifest attributes in applications and cloud services that are used by applications have been analyzed. In consequence of this analysis, many circumstances that threaten and violate user privacy and security have been detected. Moreover, with the user survey that has been made, users' knowledge and perceptions about pre-installed applications and their activities were measured. As a result, by seeing the deficiencies in the knowledge level of users about pre-installed applications, to inform users about pre-installed applications and to attract more researchers attention on pre-installed applications, the analysis results have been published on a website that has been created by author. In addition, devices that are released in this website have been evaluated with the scoring system that has been created as a result of the analyzes, and have been scored in order to give an idea about the effects of the devices on the user privacy and security.