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.