Evaluating privacy policies of AI-powered mHealth iOS applications

This paper evaluates the privacy policies of AI-powered mHealth apps,
focusing on their availability, readability, transparency, and scope. We
replicate the methodology of Sunyaev et al. 2015, for iOS apps and compile
a dataset of 2,231 AI-focused health apps. Our analysis reveals that only
68.04% of these apps have publicly accessible privacy policies. On
average, a privacy policy contains 2,784.25 words, with a mean readability
score of 13.48. Regarding transparency, aspects such as "type of
information collected" and "sharing of information" are
more frequently addressed, whereas "rationale for collection" is
less commonly discussed. Additionally, only 11.2% of the privacy policies
mention the use of user health data for training AI systems. In terms of
scope, over 60% of app privacy policies cover the single app, and 25%
cover no app-related scope.