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 findings as characteristic of a first iteration at Chinese data regulation with room for improvement.

翻译：应用隐私是一个广受关注的话题，因为许多应用会收集并共享大量高度敏感信息。为此，中国近年来出台了一系列新的数据保护法规，特别是2021年《个人信息保护法》（PIPL）。迄今，关于这些新法律对应用隐私实践影响的研究仍十分有限。为弥补这一空白，本文分析了634对中国iOS应用的数据收集情况，每对包含2020年初和2021年末的两个版本。我们的研究发现，如今更多应用实现了用户同意机制。然而，那些拒绝同意的终端用户往往会被强制退出应用。未经同意就收集数据的应用有所减少，但许多应用仍集成了跟踪库。我们认为这些发现体现了中国数据监管首次迭代的特征，仍有改进空间。