“Allow” to Achieve, Over-Privileged Inadvertently: The Unintended Cost of Task-Completion-Driven Pop-up Decisions in Mobile GUI Agents

Mobile GUI agents routinely encounter permission dialogs while executing user tasks, yet it remains unclear whether they grant only permissions appropriate to the delegated task. We study this capability, which we term **Permission Literacy**, through a four-level framework based on task relevance and privacy risk, validated by three independent experts. Across 1,072 trials involving four frontier multimodal models and five Android applications, we find that agents frequently grant permissions that fall outside the scope of the current task. Controlled interventions further show that authorization decisions are systematically shaped by both the agent-visible requester and the surrounding task context: under the same Calendar task, changing only the requester from Calendar to PiMusic reduces grants from 26/32 to 0/32, while holding a permission popup fixed and changing the task context also substantially shifts authorization behavior. Prompt-level interventions can sharply reduce unnecessary grants, but often at the cost of suppressing legitimate ones, revealing a persistent safety–utility calibration problem. These results motivate treating permission approval as an explicit, task-scoped authorization decision rather than relying solely on task-completion-oriented behavior. We instantiate this design principle with **Dynamic Minimal Permission Scope (DMPS)**, a lightweight authorization policy that separates permission approval from GUI execution. Together, our findings identify permission handling as a distinct safety requirement for autonomous GUI agents. The source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Pop-up-Decisions-in-Mobile-GUI-Agents-F2D1.