With the development of smartphones, mobile applications have become an essential part of our daily life. However, the more tasks we try to perform on mobile devices, the more information about us can be collected. Thus, privacy issues of mobile applications are gaining increasing attention.

The purpose of this thesis was to analyze current privacy notices framework, to determine whether they function as expected, and to introduce a proposal which might improve the situation.

In order to analyze the effectiveness of current privacy notices framework for smart phone applications, real world applications examples were used to show how the framework was implemented , which is followed by a psychological analysis about why they did not work satisfactorily. At last through introducing Platform of Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) and analyzing the reasons for its failure, a promising proposal could be conceived.

Current privacy notices in mobile applications are well-designed, however, users continue to ignore most of them.Although there is already a systematic design space and paragon applications to follow, privacy notices do not work out effectively as they ought to. The key point is that most people care little or only partly care about their privacy, so focusing on how to make notices more understandable and usable appears to be a wrong direction from very beginning.

In conclusion, mobile applications need a standard for privacy settings and notices. More than 10 years ago there was a standard called P3P which was proposed to release users from reading complicated web sites privacy policies and automatically apply their privacy preferences. Yet time has proved P3P was not successful but why it failed actually indicate the potential of the proposal in this thesis.