Privacy Bills of Materials (PriBOM): A Transparent Privacy Information Inventory for Collaborative Privacy Notice Generation in Mobile App Development

Privacy regulations mandate that developers must provide authentic and comprehensive privacy notices, e.g., privacy policies or labels, to inform users of their apps’ privacy practices. However, due to a lack of knowledge of privacy requirements, developers often struggle to create accurate privacy notices, especially for sophisticated mobile apps with complex features and in crowded development teams. To address these challenges, we introduce PriBOM (Privacy Bills of Materials), a systematic software engineering approach that leverages different development team roles to better capture and coordinate mobile app privacy information. PriBOM facilitates transparency-centric privacy documentation and specific privacy notice creation, enabling traceability and trackability of privacy practices. We present a pre-fill of PriBOM based on static analysis and privacy notice analysis techniques. We explore the perceived usefulness of PriBOM through a human evaluation with 150 diverse participants. The role of PriBOM in enhancing privacy-related communication is well received with 83.33% agreement, suggesting that PriBOM could serve as a significant solution for providing privacy support in DevOps for mobile apps.