Scrutinizing Privacy Policy Compliance of Virtual Personal Assistant Apps.

Xie F, Zhang Y, Yan C, Li S, Bu L, Chen K, Huang Z, Bai G. Scrutinizing Privacy Policy Compliance of Virtual Personal Assistant Apps. ASE '22: Proceedings of the 37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering. 2023; Article No.: 90, Pages 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3551349.3560416

This study investigates privacy policy compliance in Virtual Personal Assistant (VPA) applications, focusing on Amazon Alexa skills. The authors introduce "Skipper," a tool that analyzes privacy policies using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning, and compares these declared policies with actual app behaviors via black-box testing. The large-scale analysis revealed significant noncompliance with privacy policies among many Alexa skills. This work represents the first systematic study addressing privacy policy adherence in VPA apps.