Data practices in apps from Brazil: What do privacy policies inform us about?

Valéria Quadros dos Reis, Maria E. R. Rabello, Anderson C. Lima, Guilherme P. S. Jardim, Eraldo R. Fernandes, Ulf Brefeld

Abstract: We present and analyze a new corpus comprising 82 privacy policies in Brazilian Portuguese collected from popular apps in Google Play Store called APP-BR. The contained documents are characterized by excessive lengths and poor readability. Analyzing their content reveals a severe lack of objectivity and compliance with the Brazilian General Data Protection Law. Our results shed light on the problems in accessing privacy information and are supposed to constitute a basis for finding a remedy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort to evaluate privacy policies according to the current Brazilian legislation.