Evaluating the Privacy Policy of Android Apps: A Privacy Policy Compliance Study for Popular Apps in China and Europe

Abstract

Recently, with the increase in the market share of the Android system and the sharp increase in the number of Android mobile apps, many countries and regions have successively launched laws and regulations related to data security. The EU’s GDPR and China’s Information Security Technology-Personal Information Security Specification are two of the most important bills, affecting vast areas and large populations. Both regulations impose requirements on privacy policy specifications for Android apps. With these requirements, however, apps’ privacy policies have become larger. Researchers have conducted studies on whether the actual privacy behavior of apps conforms to their privacy policy description but have not focused on compliance with the privacy policy itself. In this paper, we propose evaluation metrics for privacy policy compliance and evaluate popular apps by analyzing privacy policies and apps. We applied our method to 1,000 apps from the Google Play Store in Europe and 1,000 apps from the Tencent Appstore in China. We detected a number of app privacy policy noncompliance issues and discovered a number of privacy issues with third-party services and third-party libraries.