Prior works have shown that the list of apps installed by a user reveal a lot
about user interests and behavior. These works rely on the semantics of the
installed apps and show that various user traits could be learnt automatically
using off-the-shelf machine-learning techniques. In this work, we focus on the
re-identifiability issue and thoroughly study the unicity of smartphone apps on
a dataset containing 54,893 Android users collected over a period of 7 months.
Our study finds that any 4 apps installed by a user are enough (more than 95%
times) for the re-identification of the user in our dataset. As the complete
list of installed apps is unique for 99% of the users in our dataset, it can be
easily used to track/profile the users by a service such as Twitter that has
access to the whole list of installed apps of users. As our analyzed dataset is
small as compared to the total population of Android users, we also study how
unicity would vary with larger datasets. This work emphasizes the need of
better privacy guards against collection, use and release of the list of
installed apps.