@inproceedings{b8e56979bcdc4dfd842dfd4f7a46dc1a,
title = "Tinker, Tailor, Trust: How Developers Create Privacy Policies with and Without AI",
abstract = "For mobile developers to comply with privacy regulations, they must create privacy policies that accurately describe their apps' data practices. This requires a complete understanding of their apps' behaviors, including those of embedded third-party SDKs. Despite the complexity of this process, little is known about how privacy policies are created and validated. To investigate, we interviewed 20 developers from around the world about their processes, also observing them use a large language model (LLM) to prepare privacy policies for their apps. We found that developers struggle with collecting information about third-party SDKs, even when they use LLMs, and feel uncertain about the legal validity of LLM outputs. Many developers do not seek legal assistance and believe that, as long as app stores accept their privacy policies, they are protected. Our findings suggest that reliance on LLMs and developers' desire to externalize validation may result in increasingly unreliable privacy policies.",
keywords = "AI, LLM, mobile developer, privacy policy, usable privacy",
author = "Shiva Mayahi and Noura Alomar and Nathan Malkin",
note = "Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2026 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).; 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2026 ; Conference date: 13-04-2026 Through 17-04-2026",
year = "2026",
month = apr,
day = "13",
doi = "10.1145/3772318.3791323",
language = "English (US)",
series = "Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings ",
publisher = "Association for Computing Machinery",
editor = "Nuria Oliver and Shamma, \{David A.\} and Heloisa Candello and Pablo Cesar and Pedro Lopes and Alessandro Bozzon and Thomas Kosch and Vera Liao and Xiaojuan Ma and Valentino Artizzu and Fiona Draxler and Gustavo Lopez and Reinschluessel, \{Anke V.\} and Xin Tong and \{Toups Dugas\}, \{Phoebe O.\}",
booktitle = "CHI 2026 - Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems",
}