Measuring the Effectiveness of Privacy Policies for Voice Assistant Applications
Song Liao, Christin Wilson, Long Cheng, Hongxin Hu, Huixing Deng
Abstract
Voice Assistants (VA) such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant are quickly and seamlessly integrating into people’s daily lives. The increased reliance on VA services raises privacy concerns such as the leakage of private conversations and sensitive information. Privacy policies play an important role in addressing users’ privacy concerns and informing them about the data collection, storage, and sharing practices. VA platforms (both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant) allow third-party developers to build new voice-apps and publish them to app stores. Voice-app developers are required to provide privacy policies to disclose their apps’ data practices. However, little is known whether these privacy policies are informative and trustworthy or not on emerging VA platforms. On the other hand, many users invoke voice-apps through voice and thus there exists a usability challenge for users to access these privacy policies.