PrivSTRUCT: Untangling Data Purpose Compliance of Privacy Policies in Google Play Store

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 24 Apr 2026] PrivSTRUCT: Untangling Data Purpose Compliance of Privacy Policies in Google Play Store Bhanuka Silva, Anirban Mahanti, Aruna Seneviratne, Suranga Senevirante Existing research typically treats privacy policies as flat, uniform text, extracting information without regard for the document's logical hierarchy. Disregard for structural cues of section headings designed to guide the reader, often leads automated methods to entangle distinct data practices, particularly when linking sensitive data items to their specific purposes. To address this, we introduce PrivSTRUCT, a novel and systematic encoder and decoder combined framework that to untangle complex privacy disclosures. Benchmarking against the state-of-the-art tool PoliGrapher reveals that PrivSTRUCT robustly extracts more than x2 the number of data item and purpose excerpts while retaining developer-defined structural cues. By applying PrivSTRUCT to a large-scale dataset of 3,756 Android apps, we uncover a critical transparency gap: the probability of developers overstating a data purpose is 20.4% higher for first-party collection and 9.7% higher for third-party sharing when they rely on globally defined purposes rather than specific, locally scoped disclosures. Alarmingly, we find that sensitive third-party data flows such as sharing financial data for analytics are frequently diluted and entangled into generic or unrelated categories, highlighting a persistent failure in the current purpose disclosure landscape. Comments: 20 pages, 9 figures, 2 tables Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2604.22157 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2604.22157v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.22157 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Bhanuka Pinchahewage Malith Silva [view email] [v1] Fri, 24 Apr 2026 02:12:11 UTC (1,872 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs cs.AI References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)