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表达的伦理关切。我们开展此项研究，是因为移动应用中的伦理问题普遍存在，对终端用户和社会构成严重威胁，且缺乏系统性的分析方法及检测与分类手段。此外，应用商店评论使从业者能够从地理分布广泛、规模庞大的用户群体中收集用户观点，这对识别软件缺陷至关重要。在分析过程中，我们收集了五百万条用户评论，构建了一套反映用户偏好的伦理关切集合，并对部分样本进行了人工标注。研究发现：(1) 用户高度关注审查制度、身份盗窃及安全性等伦理问题；(2) 涉及伦理关切的用户评论通常篇幅更长、关注度更高且评分较低；(3) 这些评论的分类与过滤具有较高的自动化潜力。研究结果表明，在软件演化过程中系统性地考量伦理关切时，应用商店评论具有重要参考价值。