English

Do Phone-Use Agents Respect Your Privacy?

Cryptography and Security 2026-04-03 v2 Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language Machine Learning

Abstract

We study whether phone-use agents respect privacy while completing benign mobile tasks. This question has remained hard to answer because privacy-compliant behavior is not operationalized for phone-use agents, and ordinary apps do not reveal exactly what data agents type into which form entries during execution. To make this question measurable, we introduce MyPhoneBench, a verifiable evaluation framework for privacy behavior in mobile agents. We operationalize privacy-respecting phone use as permissioned access, minimal disclosure, and user-controlled memory through a minimal privacy contract, iMy, and pair it with instrumented mock apps plus rule-based auditing that make unnecessary permission requests, deceptive re-disclosure, and unnecessary form filling observable and reproducible. Across five frontier models on 10 mobile apps and 300 tasks, we find that task success, privacy-compliant task completion, and later-session use of saved preferences are distinct capabilities, and no single model dominates all three. Evaluating success and privacy jointly reshuffles the model ordering relative to either metric alone. The most persistent failure mode across models is simple data minimization: agents still fill optional personal entries that the task does not require. These results show that privacy failures arise from over-helpful execution of benign tasks, and that success-only evaluation overestimates the deployment readiness of current phone-use agents. All code, mock apps, and agent trajectories are publicly available at~ https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/MyPhoneBench.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.00986,
  title  = {Do Phone-Use Agents Respect Your Privacy?},
  author = {Zhengyang Tang and Ke Ji and Xidong Wang and Zihan Ye and Xinyuan Wang and Yiduo Guo and Ziniu Li and Chenxin Li and Jingyuan Hu and Shunian Chen and Tongxu Luo and Jiaxi Bi and Zeyu Qin and Shaobo Wang and Xin Lai and Pengyuan Lyu and Junyi Li and Can Xu and Chengquan Zhang and Han Hu and Ming Yan and Benyou Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.00986},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

work in progress

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:48:24.413Z