Mobile applications (apps) are an essential part of today’s connected digital world, and their privacy policies are the legal source that describes how apps collect and use user data. The absence of clear guidelines and outlines to assist app developers with the writing of privacy policies can lead to user confusion and diminished trust in mobile apps. In this work, we study the completeness of privacy policies by developing a novel framework to assess them and applying it to analyze 72,342 privacy policies from the Google Play Store. The Google Play Store platform mandates its app developers to publish a privacy policy but does not enforce a universal standard for their quality. We have observed that 56.2% of these policies are comprehensive, containing the essential information about the privacy policy that should be included. This highlights the necessity for more thorough privacy policies in mobile apps. Our results highlight that it is essential to develop tools that assist mobile app developers to clearly and completely describe how they collect, use, store, and share user data, thereby increasing privacy transparency and accountability.

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Completeness Analysis of Mobile Apps’ Privacy Policies by Using Deep Learning

  • Khalid Alkhattabi,
  • Chuan Yue

摘要

Mobile applications (apps) are an essential part of today’s connected digital world, and their privacy policies are the legal source that describes how apps collect and use user data. The absence of clear guidelines and outlines to assist app developers with the writing of privacy policies can lead to user confusion and diminished trust in mobile apps. In this work, we study the completeness of privacy policies by developing a novel framework to assess them and applying it to analyze 72,342 privacy policies from the Google Play Store. The Google Play Store platform mandates its app developers to publish a privacy policy but does not enforce a universal standard for their quality. We have observed that 56.2% of these policies are comprehensive, containing the essential information about the privacy policy that should be included. This highlights the necessity for more thorough privacy policies in mobile apps. Our results highlight that it is essential to develop tools that assist mobile app developers to clearly and completely describe how they collect, use, store, and share user data, thereby increasing privacy transparency and accountability.