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.

翻译：本研究分析了用户在应用商店评论中发现的伦理问题。我们开展此项研究的原因是：移动应用中的伦理问题普遍存在，对最终用户和社会构成严重威胁，且缺乏系统的分析以及检测与分类方法。此外，应用商店评论使从业者能够从地理分布广泛且规模庞大的受众中收集用户观点，这对识别软件缺陷至关重要。为进行分析，我们收集了五百万条用户评论，构建了一套代表用户偏好的伦理问题集合，并手动标注了部分评论样本。我们发现：(1) 用户对审查、身份盗窃和安全方面的伦理问题报告率较高；(2) 涉及伦理问题的用户评论通常更长、更受欢迎但评分较低；(3) 这些评论的分类与过滤具有高度自动化潜力。我们的研究结果凸显了在软件演化过程中系统性地考虑伦理问题时，利用应用商店评论的重要性。