M6—Inadequate Privacy Controls

>Control Description

**Application Specific** Privacy controls are concerned with protecting Personally Identifiable Information (PII), e.g., names and addresses, credit card information, e-mail and IP addresses, information about health, religion, sexuality and political opinions. This information is valuable to attackers for several reasons. For example, an attacker could - Impersonate the victim to commit a fraud, - Misuse the victim's payment data, - Blackmail the victim with sensitive information or - Harm the victim by destroying or manipulating the victim's critical data. In general, PII could either be leaked (i.e., a violation of confidentiality), manipulated (violation of integrity) or destroyed/blocked (violation of availability).

>Prevention & Mitigation Strategies

1.Minimize the amount and variety of PII processed; assess whether all PII collected is truly necessary for the app's functionality.
2.Replace fine-grained PII with less critical information where possible (e.g., coarse-grained location instead of precise coordinates).
3.Anonymize or blur PII using techniques like hashing, bucketing, or adding noise; delete PII after an appropriate expiration period.
4.Sanitize logs and error messages to ensure they do not contain PII; ensure third-party libraries do not leak PII in their log output.
5.Never transmit PII as URL query parameters; send sensitive information in request headers or body instead.
6.Explicitly configure backup settings and the hasFragileUserData flag (Android) to control PII exposure through device backups.

>Attack Scenarios

>References

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