Conflect: Designing Reflective Thinking-Based Contextual Privacy Policy for Mobile Applications

Abstract: Privacy policies are lengthy and complex, leading to user neglect. While contextual privacy policies (CPPs) present information at the point of risk, they may lack engagement and disrupt tasks. We propose Conflect, an interactive CPP for mobile apps, guided by a reflective thinking framework. Through three workshops with experienced designers and researchers, we constructed the design space of reflective thinking-based CPP design, and identified the disconnect between context and action as the most critical problem. Based on participants' feedback, we designed Conflect to use sidebar alerts, allowing users to reflect on contextualized risks and fostering their control. Our system contextually detects privacy risks, extracts policy segments, and automatically generates risk descriptions with 94.0% policy extraction accuracy on CPP4APP dataset and a 4.35s latency. A user study (N=28) demonstrated that Conflect improves user understanding, trust, and satisfaction while lowering cognitive load compared to CPPs, privacy policies and privacy labels.