Many mobile device end users believe that privacy is important when dealing with personal health-related information, but the challenge is to develop privacy policies in a meaningful way so that mobile software application developers can adequately meet the requirements of their intended end users. Comprehensive privacy policies, which meet self-regulatory guidelines of increasing transparency on data collection, are often written in a way that average mobile users cannot understand or completely ignore. This paper provides the results of a privacy policy comparison including application permissions requested and several readability metrics used to assess the current state of privacy policies in the health and fitness mobile application market. Our analysis indicates that developers may not be considering their end-users’ reading comprehension levels and specific application permissions are not adequately addressed when developers are creating their privacy policies.

Sustaining privacy and trust is paramount in the e-Health industry between service providers and their end users. This work provides a snapshot of mobile device end user privacy concerns and behaviors. It provides descriptive statistics and utilizes an adaptation of the Westin privacy indexes to illustrate gender differences in privacy concerns. The results show an overall increase in concerns in an eleven-month period between independent samples of 989 undergraduate students. It consistently shows females reported higher concerns than their male counterparts. Mobile application developers should consider novel ways of addressing these possible differences in privacy related concerns and behaviors by gender.

Many novice software developers do not have the training, experience or appropriate resources in developing privacy policies for their applications. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some new software developers create original, natural language privacy policies, use existing privacy policies as templates or an external agency (i.e., a legal counsel). This paper presents an overview of the privacy Policy Auto-Generation in Eclipse (PAGE), a work-in-progress that seeks to integrate privacy planning capabilities into the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE), enabling application developers to create privacy policies as development occurs. This should support privacy by design concepts, enhance team communication through reusability, as well as reduce costs due to errors or extra time in external activities.

Many computing departments are integrating mobile computing into their curriculum to provide students with the requisite technical, entrepreneurial, software engineering and programming skills desired in today's job market. Mobile computing has also been used as a learning intervention to motivate student interest and contextualize learning. This work presents the results of a literature analysis investigating the state of practice in computing education to understand the contexts, themes and approaches that the academic community is taking to teach mobile computing.