PrivacyGrade: Finally An Objective Mobile App Grading System

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University launched a mobile app privacy grading system earlier this month called privacygrade.org. Last week, I wrote about privacy policies, and so this fit perfectly. I'm really excited to watch this project because it could be an initial phase of the taming of the wild android west.  The privacygrade team is led by Professor Jason Hong. The main contributors are Jialiu Lin, Shahriyar Amini, Song Luan, Mike Villena, and Richmond Wong.

Each app is assigned a letter grade between A and D based on:

1. the gap between user expectation of an app's behavior and its actual behavior- the surprise factor;
2. software analysis of app data collection and usage;