Exploring Ethical Concerns of Mobile Applications from App Reviews: A Literature Survey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Privacy, security, and accessibility, like ethical concerns in mobile applications (a.k.a. apps), commonly subsumed under non-functional requirements, are generally reported by users through app reviews available in app stores. However, these remain unidentified among other types of reviews, such as user experiences, problem reports, and new feature discussions. Over the past decade, extensive research has focused on extracting valuable information from app reviews, including feature requests and bug reports. However, there remains a lack of a synthesis of research related to app review analysis for exploring users' ethical concerns. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of this research area, covering 37 relevant studies published since 2012, identified from the initial 553 studies using specific inclusion and exclusion criteria. The studies examined vary in review counts, ranging from 500 to 626 million, and include between a single and 1.3 million apps. Our detailed analysis highlights diverse objectives, methodologies, and strategies, along with additional resources such as app privacy policies, which researchers generally utilize to analyze ethical concerns. Our findings also identify persistent barriers to privacy, security, accessibility, transparency, fairness, accountability, and safety, as reported by users in app reviews. Furthermore, we propose a research agenda that focuses on four key areas, including automated extraction and classification of ethical concerns-related app reviews. Our survey outcomes can assist developers and system architects in recognizing and prioritizing non-functional requirements at the initial stages of the development lifecycle, whereas researchers can expand upon this synthesis to create tools for the automated detection of ethical concerns.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".