Mind the Third Eye! Benchmarking Privacy Awareness in MLLM-powered
  Smartphone Agents
Authors: name: Zhixin Lin; name: Jungang Li; name: Shidong Pan; name: Yibo Shi; name: Yue Yao; name: Dongliang Xu
Published: 2025-08-27 00:41:28

Abstract: Smartphones bring significant convenience to users but also enable devices to
extensively record various types of personal information. Existing smartphone
agents powered by Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved
remarkable performance in automating different tasks. However, as the cost,
these agents are granted substantial access to sensitive users' personal
information during this operation. To gain a thorough understanding of the
privacy awareness of these agents, we present the first large-scale benchmark
encompassing 7,138 scenarios to the best of our knowledge. In addition, for
privacy context in scenarios, we annotate its type (e.g., Account Credentials),
sensitivity level, and location. We then carefully benchmark seven available
mainstream smartphone agents. Our results demonstrate that almost all
benchmarked agents show unsatisfying privacy awareness (RA), with performance
remaining below 60% even with explicit hints. Overall, closed-source agents
show better privacy ability than open-source ones, and Gemini 2.0-flash
achieves the best, achieving an RA of 67%. We also find that the agents'
privacy detection capability is highly related to scenario sensitivity level,
i.e., the scenario with a higher sensitivity level is typically more
identifiable. We hope the findings enlighten the research community to rethink
the unbalanced utility-privacy tradeoff about smartphone agents. Our code and
benchmark are available at https://zhixin-l.github.io/SAPA-Bench.