Detecting Phantom Data Usage on Smartphones with Analysis of Contextual Information

• Main Authors: Shiqi Jiang, Pengfei Zhou, Mo Li
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publishing 2015-11-01
• Series: International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1155/2015/135150

With the wide development of smartphones, mobile data usage has enjoyed rapid growth in recent years. Unfortunately many users are plagued with Phantom Data Usage (PDU), which refers to the unexpected mobile data usage that does not accord with user perception. We investigate about 400 real PDU issues and find the causes of PDU are not only the exceptions of applications, for example, software bugs or malware, but also the user's personalized misuse. Based on the observations that each user preserves specific data usage patterns under particular environmental context, we present PDS, a PDU detection system, which automatically detects whether the current data usage is consumed as expected. Results from our evaluation experiments show that 72% of PDU cases detected by PDS are confirmed by users.