Wi-Fi Privacy Police prevents your smartphone or tablet from leaking privacy sensitive information via Wi-Fi networks. It does this in two ways:
- It prevents your smartphone from sending out the names of Wi-Fi networks it wants to connect to over the air. This makes sure that other people in your surroundings can not see the networks you've connecte to, and the places you've visited.
- If your smartphone encounters an unknown access point with a known name (for example, a malicious access point pretending to be your home network), it asks whether you trust this access point before connecting. This makes sure that other people are not able to steal your data.
Wi-Fi Privacy Police does not have any negative impact on your battery. In fact, you may see your battery life increase by using this app.
View our short paper or our slightly longer paper for more technical information.
Wi-Fi Privacy Police is an app developed at the Expertise Center for Digital Media, a research institute of UHasselt. Its code was written by Bram Bonné. The application is available on Google Play and F-Droid.
PrivacyPolice now requires the location permission to run. This is because Android 6.0 does not allow access to the list of Wi-Fi networks without this location. PrivacyPolice will never collect your information. Please consult the source code at https://github.com/BramBonne/privacypolice if you have any doubts.
Note to those using CyanogenMod: make sure that Privacy Guard is not blocking access to Wi-Fi Privacy Police, as it will then not be able to see the available networks. This will cause Wi-Fi Privacy Police to disable access to all of them.
A lot of effort went into making this app work flawlessly. If you, however, run into any problems when using this app, nor the app developers, nor the UHasselt take responsibility. You are encouraged to report any issues at [email protected] or via GitHub; we will try to fix them as soon as possible.
Should you have any other questions about the app, feel free to drop by on reddit (either at /r/Android or at /r/androidapps) to see our FAQ and/or pose your own question.