scholarly journals How private is your period?: A systematic analysis of menstrual app privacy policies

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (4) ◽  
pp. 491-510
Author(s):  
Laura Shipp ◽  
Jorge Blasco
Keyword(s):  
Reproductive Cycle ◽  
Mobile Applications ◽  
Personal Data ◽  
Third Parties ◽  
Privacy Policies ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Related Data ◽  
Present Information

AbstractMenstruapps are mobile applications that can track a user’s reproductive cycle, sex life and health in order to provide them with algorithmically derived insights into their body. These apps are now hugely popular, with the most favoured boasting over 100 million downloads. In this study, we investigate the privacy practices of a set of 30 Android menstruapps, a set which accounts for nearly 200 million downloads.We measured how the apps present information and behave on a number of privacy related topics, such as the complexity of the language used, the information collected by them, the involvement of third parties and how they describe user rights. Our results show that while common pieces of personal data such as name, email, etc. are treated appropriately by most applications, reproductive-related data is not covered by the privacy policies and in most cases, completely disregarded, even when it is required for the apps to work. We have informed app developers of our findings and have tried to engage them in dialogue around improving their privacy practices.

Ethical Ambiguities in the Privacy Policies of Mobile Health and Fitness Applications

2019 ◽  
pp. 877-888
Author(s):  
Devjani Sen ◽  
Rukhsana Ahmed
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Health ◽  
Mobile Applications ◽  
Personal Information ◽  
Personal Data ◽  
Third Parties ◽  
Privacy Policies ◽  
Email Address ◽  
Health And Fitness ◽  
The Creation

Personal applications (apps) collect all sorts of personal information like name, email address, age, height, weight, and in some cases, detailed health information. When using such apps, many users trustfully log everything from diet to sleep patterns. Studies suggest that many applications do not have a privacy policy, or users do not have access to an app's permissions before s/he downloads it to the mobile device. This raises questions regarding the ethics around sharing personal data gathered from health and fitness apps to third parties. Despite the important role of informed consent in the creation of health and fitness mobile applications, the intersection of ethics and sharing of personal information is understudied and is an often-ignored topic during the creation of mobile applications. After reviewing the online privacy policies of four mobile health and fitness apps, this chapter concludes with a set of recommendations when designing privacy policies to share personal information collected from health and fitness apps.

Ethical Ambiguities in the Privacy Policies of Mobile Health and Fitness Applications

2018 ◽  
pp. 6083-6093
Author(s):  
Devjani Sen ◽  
Rukhsana Ahmed
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Health ◽  
Mobile Applications ◽  
Personal Information ◽  
Personal Data ◽  
Third Parties ◽  
Privacy Policies ◽  
Email Address ◽  
Health And Fitness ◽  
The Creation

Personal Applications (apps) collect all sorts of personal information like name, email address, age, height, weight and in some cases detailed health information. When using such apps, many users trustfully log everything from diet to sleep patterns. Studies suggest that many applications do not have a privacy policy, or users do not have access to an app's permissions before s/he downloads it to the mobile device. This raises questions regarding the ethics around sharing personal data gathered from health and fitness apps to third parties. Despite the important role of informed consent in the creation of health and fitness mobile applications, the intersection of ethics and sharing of personal information is understudied and is an often-ignored topic during the creation of mobile applications. After reviewing the online privacy policies of four mobile health and fitness apps, this chapter concludes with a set of recommendations when designing privacy policies to share personal information collected from health and fitness apps.

How Do Mobile Applications for Cancer Communicate About Their Privacy Practices?

2021 ◽  
pp. 113-144
Author(s):  
Zerin Mahzabin Khan ◽  
Rukhsana Ahmed ◽  
Devjani Sen
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Applications ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Data Privacy ◽  
Mobile Apps ◽  
Personal Data ◽  
End Users ◽  
Privacy Policies ◽  
Inadequate Information ◽  
Practical Implications ◽  
Complex Manner

No previous research on cancer mobile applications (apps) has investigated issues associated with the data privacy of its consumers. The current chapter addressed this gap in the literature by assessing the content of online privacy policies of selected cancer mobile apps through applying a checklist and performing an in-depth critical analysis to determine how the apps communicated their privacy practices to end users. The results revealed that the privacy policies were mostly ambiguous, with content often presented in a complex manner and inadequate information on the ownership, use, disclosure, retention, and collection of end users' personal data. These results highlight the importance of improving the transparency of privacy practices in health and fitness cancer mobile apps to clearly and effectively communicate how end users' personal data are collected, stored, and shared. The chapter concludes with recommendations and discussion on practical implications for stakeholders like cancer app users, developers, policymakers, and clinicians.

How Do Mobile Applications for Cancer Communicate About Their Privacy Practices?

2021 ◽  
pp. 667-691
Author(s):  
Zerin Mahzabin Khan ◽  
Rukhsana Ahmed ◽  
Devjani Sen
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Applications ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Data Privacy ◽  
Mobile Apps ◽  
Personal Data ◽  
End Users ◽  
Privacy Policies ◽  
Inadequate Information ◽  
Practical Implications ◽  
Complex Manner

No previous research on cancer mobile applications (apps) has investigated issues associated with the data privacy of its consumers. The current chapter addressed this gap in the literature by assessing the content of online privacy policies of selected cancer mobile apps through applying a checklist and performing an in-depth critical analysis to determine how the apps communicated their privacy practices to end users. The results revealed that the privacy policies were mostly ambiguous, with content often presented in a complex manner and inadequate information on the ownership, use, disclosure, retention, and collection of end users' personal data. These results highlight the importance of improving the transparency of privacy practices in health and fitness cancer mobile apps to clearly and effectively communicate how end users' personal data are collected, stored, and shared. The chapter concludes with recommendations and discussion on practical implications for stakeholders like cancer app users, developers, policymakers, and clinicians.

How Do Mobile Applications for Cancer Communicate About Their Privacy Practices?

2021 ◽  
pp. 1929-1953
Author(s):  
Zerin Mahzabin Khan ◽  
Rukhsana Ahmed ◽  
Devjani Sen
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Applications ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Data Privacy ◽  
Mobile Apps ◽  
Personal Data ◽  
End Users ◽  
Privacy Policies ◽  
Inadequate Information ◽  
Practical Implications ◽  
Complex Manner

No previous research on cancer mobile applications (apps) has investigated issues associated with the data privacy of its consumers. The current chapter addressed this gap in the literature by assessing the content of online privacy policies of selected cancer mobile apps through applying a checklist and performing an in-depth critical analysis to determine how the apps communicated their privacy practices to end users. The results revealed that the privacy policies were mostly ambiguous, with content often presented in a complex manner and inadequate information on the ownership, use, disclosure, retention, and collection of end users' personal data. These results highlight the importance of improving the transparency of privacy practices in health and fitness cancer mobile apps to clearly and effectively communicate how end users' personal data are collected, stored, and shared. The chapter concludes with recommendations and discussion on practical implications for stakeholders like cancer app users, developers, policymakers, and clinicians.

Automated Extraction and Presentation of Data Practices in Privacy Policies

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (2) ◽  
pp. 88-110
Author(s):  
Duc Bui ◽  
Kang G. Shin ◽  
Jong-Min Choi ◽  
Junbum Shin
Keyword(s):  
User Study ◽  
Personal Information ◽  
Personal Data ◽  
Neural Model ◽  
Automated Analysis ◽  
Entity Recognition ◽  
Automated System ◽  
Privacy Policies ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Data Practices

Abstract Privacy policies are documents required by law and regulations that notify users of the collection, use, and sharing of their personal information on services or applications. While the extraction of personal data objects and their usage thereon is one of the fundamental steps in their automated analysis, it remains challenging due to the complex policy statements written in legal (vague) language. Prior work is limited by small/generated datasets and manually created rules. We formulate the extraction of fine-grained personal data phrases and the corresponding data collection or sharing practices as a sequence-labeling problem that can be solved by an entity-recognition model. We create a large dataset with 4.1k sentences (97k tokens) and 2.6k annotated fine-grained data practices from 30 real-world privacy policies to train and evaluate neural networks. We present a fully automated system, called PI-Extract, which accurately extracts privacy practices by a neural model and outperforms, by a large margin, strong rule-based baselines. We conduct a user study on the effects of data practice annotation which highlights and describes the data practices extracted by PI-Extract to help users better understand privacy-policy documents. Our experimental evaluation results show that the annotation significantly improves the users’ reading comprehension of policy texts, as indicated by a 26.6% increase in the average total reading score.

scholarly journals Cybersecurity als Unternehmensleitungsaufgabe

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cyber Security ◽  
Personal Data ◽  
Third Parties ◽  
Law School ◽  
The Other ◽  
Critical Infrastructures ◽  
Labour Law ◽  
Special Obligations ◽  
The One ◽  
Liability Risks

Cybersecurity is a central challenge for many companies. On the one hand, companies have to protect themselves against cyberattacks; on the other hand, they have special obligations towards third parties and the state in critical infrastructures or when dealing with personal data. These responsibilities converge with company management. This volume examines the duties and liability risks of management in connection with cyber security from the perspective of corporate, constitutional and labour law. The volume is based on a conference of the same name, which took place in cooperation with the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung für die Freiheit on 23 and 24 October 2020 at Bucerius Law School in Hamburg. With contributions by Andreas Beyer, Marc Bittner, Alexander Brüggemeier, Anabel Guntermann, Katrin Haußmann, Dennis-Kenji Kipker, Christoph Benedikt Müller, Isabella Risini, Darius Rostam, Sarah Schmidt-Versteyl and Gerald Spindler.

AppAware: a policy visualization model for mobile applications

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-132
Author(s):  
Ioannis Paspatis ◽  
Aggeliki Tsohou ◽  
Spyros Kokolakis
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Device ◽  
Mobile Applications ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
Smart Device ◽  
Online Service ◽  
Privacy Policies ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Online Service Providers ◽  
Common User

Purpose Privacy policies emerge as the main mechanism to inform users on the way their information is managed by online service providers, and still remain the dominant approach for this purpose. The literature notes that users find difficulties in understanding privacy policies because they are usually written in technical or legal language even, although most users are unfamiliar with them. These difficulties have led most users to skip reading privacy policies and blindly accept them. This study aims to address this challenge this paper presents AppAware, a multiplatform tool that intends to improve the visualization of privacy policies for mobile applications. Design/methodology/approach AppAware formulates a visualized report with the permission set of an application, which is easily understandable by a common user. AppAware aims to bridge the difficulty to read privacy policies and android’s obscure permission set with a new privacy policy visualization model. Thus, we propose AppAware parser, a mobile add-on that acts complementary with AppAware and helps mobile device users to monitor the applications they installed to their smart device. Findings To validate AppAware, the authors conducted a survey through questionnaire aiming to evaluate AppAware in terms of installability, usability and viability-purpose. The results demonstrate that AppAware is assessed above average by the users in all categories. Originality/value In the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is no such approach as AppAware as an application nor AppAware parser as add-on.

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