Authors: Zhengyang Tang, Ke Ji, Xidong Wang, Zihan Ye, Xinyuan Wang, Yiduo Guo, Ziniu Li, Chenxin Li, Jingyuan Hu, Shunian Chen, Tongxu Luo, Jiaxi Bi, Zeyu Qin, Shaobo Wang, Xin Lai, Pengyuan Lyu, Junyi Li, Can Xu, Chengquan Zhang, Han Hu, Ming Yan, Benyou Wang
Organizations: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen · Hunyuan Team, Tencent · The University of Hong Kong · The Chinese University of Hong Kong · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · Shanghai Jiao Tong University
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.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Real-app examples of how a phone-use agent can cross privacy boundaries during a benign mobile task.
Figure 2: Representative execution under the iMy privacy contract. Two strong models use the same four-tool privacy interface but diverge on permission-gated access, unnecessary disclosure, and later-session preference saving. Full trajectories are available in the released artifacts.
Figure 3: The iMy interface (left) and three recurring privacy-risk structures operationalized as controlled probes (right). Left: iMy separates default-access from permission-required data and keeps saved items visible, editable, and deletable. Right: the three probe structures used to test over-permissioning, trap resistance, and form minimization (Section 2.4 ).
Model
Task success rate (%)
Average privacy (%)
Privacy-qualified success rate (%)
Later-session use (%)
Claude Opus 4.6
82.8
68.4
47.2
72.0
Qwen 3.5 Plus
76.0
73.8
47.6
48.0
Kimi K2.5
65.2
77.3
45.2
58.0
Doubao Seed 1.8
57.2
71.0
31.2
42.0
Gemini 3 Pro
50.4
60.5
22.0
20.0
Table 1: Main results aggregated over 300 tasks spanning 10 controlled apps. All scores are reported as percentages. Different columns have different leaders. The per-probe breakdown appears in Figure 4 .
Figure 4: Privacy probes by model (a) and by app (b). Form minimization is the hardest probe for all models.
Figure 5: Later-session use of saved preferences. (a) Two single-session proxy diagnostics—saved after Session A and used when needed—compared with the paired later-session transfer metric. (b) Gap between single-session proxies and true later-session transfer.
Appendix figures & tables5 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Category
Action
Parameters
Description
GUI Actions
click
x, y
Tap at coordinates
long_press
x, y
Long-press at coordinates
type
text
Type text into focused field
scroll
direction
Scroll up/down/left/right
open
app_name
Launch an application
navigate_home
—
Return to home screen
Appendix
Table 2: Full action space used by the evaluated agents. The agent may perform one GUI action, invoke one iMy privacy-contract action, or end the task. Privacy decisions occur inside the same action loop as ordinary task completion.
Figure 6: Average privacy and privacy-qualified success answer different questions. (a) Different metrics yield different leaders. (b) The joint ranking shifts with the threshold but the main conclusion is stable: evaluating success and privacy jointly changes the picture relative to either metric alone.
Domain
App
Inspired by
Privacy focus
Healthcare
mZocdoc
Zocdoc
Medical records, insurance
Healthcare
mCVS
CVS Pharmacy
Medications, allergies
Food
mDoorDash
DoorDash
Address, payment, diet
Travel
mBooking
Booking.com
Passport, room preferences
Real Estate
mZillow
Zillow
Budget, neighborhood
Finance
mGEICO
GEICO
Vehicle info, SSN
Appendix
Table 3: Mock app suite. Each app is a research-only mock environment inspired by a real-world service category. The apps are independently implemented and are not affiliated with or endorsed by the referenced commercial services.
Model
Mode
Interpretation
Claude
fractional
expressions like x/W,y/H on the original screenshot
Kimi
decimal
0–1 relative coordinates
Qwen
normalized
0–1000 normalized coordinates
Doubao
normalized
0–1000 normalized coordinates
Gemini
normalized
0–999 normalized coordinates
Appendix
Table 4: Coordinate handling for the five evaluated models. The framework converts these model-specific coordinate conventions to emulator actions before execution, reducing evaluation differences caused purely by pointer encoding format.
Model
Saved After A (%)
Used When Needed (%)
Later-session use (%)
Claude Opus 4.6
87
73
72
Kimi K2.5
67
58
58
Qwen 3.5 Plus
73
68
48
Doubao Seed 1.8
50
48
42
Gemini 3 Pro
73
18
20
Appendix
Table 5: Later-session use of saved preferences: supporting diagnostics across 50 cross-session pairs spanning 10 mock apps. All scores are reported as percentages. ‘Saved After A’ and ‘Used When Needed’ are single-session proxy diagnostics, while ‘Later-session use’ is the paired later-session metric used in the main results.