The privacy of personal information has received significant attention in mobile software. Although previous researchers have designed some methods to identify the conflict between app behavior and privacy policies, little is known about investigating regulation requirements for third-party libraries (TPLs). The regulators enacted multiple regulations to regulate the usage of personal information for TPLs (e.g., the "California Consumer Privacy Act" requires businesses clearly notify consumers if they share consumers' data with third parties or not). However, it remains challenging to analyze the legality of TPLs due to three reasons: 1) TPLs are mainly published on public repositoriesinstead of app market (e.g., Google play). The public repositories do not perform privacy compliance analysis for each TPL. 2) TPLs only provide independent functions or function sequences. They cannot run independently, which limits the application of performing dynamic analysis. 3) Since not all the functions of TPLs are related to user privacy, we must locate the functions of TPLs that access/process personal information before performing privacy compliance analysis. To overcome the above challenges, in this paper, we propose an automated system named ATPChecker to analyze whether the Android TPLs meet privacy-related regulations or not. Our findings remind developers to be mindful of TPL usage when developing apps or writing privacy policies to avoid violating regulations.

翻译：个人信息隐私在移动软件中已受到显著关注。尽管先前研究人员设计了一些方法来识别应用行为与隐私政策之间的冲突，但针对第三方库（TPLs）的监管要求调查仍鲜有涉及。监管机构颁布了多项法规以规范TPLs对个人信息的使用（例如，《加州消费者隐私法案》要求企业在与第三方共享消费者数据时明确告知消费者）。然而，分析TPLs的合法性仍面临三大挑战：1）TPLs主要发布在公共仓库而非应用市场（如Google Play）。公共仓库并未对每个TPL进行隐私合规性分析。2）TPLs仅提供独立功能或功能序列，无法独立运行，这限制了动态分析的应用。3）由于TPLs并非所有功能都与用户隐私相关，在进行隐私合规性分析前，必须定位其访问/处理个人信息的函数。为克服上述挑战，本文提出名为ATPChecker的自动化系统，用于分析Android TPLs是否符合隐私相关法规。我们的研究提醒开发者在开发应用或编写隐私政策时需谨慎使用TPLs，以避免违反法规。