Privacy in apps is a topic of widespread interest because many apps collect and share large amounts of highly sensitive information. In response, China introduced a range of new data protection laws over recent years, notably the Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) in 2021. So far, there exists limited research on the impacts of these new laws on apps' privacy practices. To address this gap, this paper analyses data collection in pairs of 634 Chinese iOS apps, one version from early 2020 and one from late 2021. Our work finds that many more apps now implement consent. Yet, those end-users that decline consent will often be forced to exit the app. Fewer apps now collect data without consent but many still integrate tracking libraries. We see our Andings as characteristic of a Arst iteration at Chinese data regulation with room for improvement.

翻译：应用程序中的隐私问题是一个广受关注的话题，因为许多应用程序会收集并共享大量高度敏感信息。对此，中国近年来出台了一系列新的数据保护法律，尤其是2021年的《个人信息保护法》。目前，关于这些新法律对应用程序隐私实践影响的研究仍然有限。为弥补这一空白，本文分析了634对中国iOS应用程序（每对包括2020年初和2021年底各一个版本）的数据收集情况。研究发现，如今更多应用程序实施了用户同意机制。然而，拒绝同意的终端用户往往会被强制退出应用程序。未经同意收集数据的应用程序减少了，但仍有大量应用程序集成了跟踪库。我们认为，我们的发现体现了中国数据监管初期阶段的特点，仍有改进空间。