The best ends by the best means: ethical concerns in app reviews

This work analyzes ethical concerns found in users’ app store reviews. We performed this study because ethical concerns in mobile applications (apps) are widespread, pose severe threats to end users and society, and lack systematic analysis and methods for detection and classification. In addition, app store reviews allow practitioners to collect users’ perspectives, crucial for identifying software flaws, from a geographically distributed and large-scale audience. For our analysis, we collected five million user reviews, developed a set of ethical concerns representative of user preferences, and manually labeled a sample of these reviews. We found that (1) users highly report ethical concerns about censorship, identity theft, and safety (2) user reviews with ethical concerns are longer, more popular, and lowly rated, and (3) there is high automation potential for the classification and filtering of these reviews. Our results highlight the relevance of using app store reviews for the systematic consideration of ethical concerns during software evolution.