The prevalent engagement with mobile apps underscores the importance of understanding their data practices. Transparency plays a crucial role in this context, ensuring users to be informed and give consent before any data access occurs. Apple introduced a new feature since iOS 15.2, App Privacy Report, to inform users about detailed insights into apps' data access and sharing. This feature continues Apple's trend of privacy-focused innovations (following Privacy Nutrition Labels), and has been marketed as a big step forward in user privacy. However, its real-world impacts on user privacy and control remain unexamined. We thus proposed an end-to-end study involving systematic assessment of the App Privacy Report's real-world benefits and limitations, LLM-enabled and multi-technique synthesized enhancements, and comprehensive evaluation from both system and user perspectives. Through a structured focus group study with twelve everyday iOS users, we explored their experiences, understanding, and perceptions of the feature, suggesting its limited practical impact resulting from missing important details. We identified two primary user concerns: the clarity of data access purpose and domain description. In response, we proposed enhancements including a purpose inference framework and domain clarification pipeline. We demonstrated the effectiveness and benefits of such enhancements for mobile app users. This work provides practical insights that could help enhance user privacy transparency and discusses areas for future research.
翻译：移动应用的广泛使用凸显了理解其数据实践的重要性。在此背景下，透明度发挥着关键作用，确保用户在数据访问发生前能够知情并同意。苹果自iOS 15.2起引入了一项新功能——应用隐私报告，旨在向用户提供关于应用数据访问与共享的详细洞察。该功能延续了苹果以隐私为核心的技术创新趋势（继隐私营养标签之后），并被宣传为用户隐私保护的一大进步。然而，其对用户隐私与控制的实际影响尚未得到检验。为此，我们提出了一项端到端研究，包括系统评估应用隐私报告的实际效益与局限、基于大语言模型与多技术融合的增强方案，以及从系统和用户双视角的综合评估。通过对12位日常iOS用户开展结构化焦点小组研究，我们探讨了他们对这一功能的体验、理解与感知，指出其因缺失关键细节而导致的实际影响有限。我们识别出用户的两大主要关切：数据访问目的与域名描述的清晰度。针对此，我们提出了包含目的推断框架与域名澄清流程的增强方案，并论证了此类增强对移动应用用户的有效性与益处。本研究提供了有助于提升用户隐私透明度的实践洞见，并探讨了未来研究方向。
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