Analysing User Reviews to Identify User Concerns Around Permissions in AI Apps
Authors: Babar Shah, Faheem Ullah, Myles Watkinson, Muhammad Moiz Khalid, Tehmina Karamat Khan, Muhammad Junaid
Organizations: College of Technological Innovation, Zayed University, UAE · College of Interdisciplinary Studies, Zayed University, UAE · University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia · National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, Pakistan · School of Computer Science, Taylor’s University, Malaysia · Dept of Statistics, Islamia College University, Peshawar, Pakistan
Artificial intelligence is increasingly embedded in everyday software, making its integration into mobile apps inevitable. However, AI mobile app developers are not always versed in security and privacy best practices, leaving users to monitor their own security and understand how apps use their data. App reviews capture real user experiences, helping others make informed decisions before downloading. This paper presents a machine learning model for classifying AI app reviews into permission-related categories. Because user reviews are unstructured, assembling a conventional labeled training set is difficult. To address this, AI-generated security and permission reviews are used to identify relevant training examples from a large corpus of human-written reviews, eliminating the need for manual annotation. The proposed approach classified permission reviews with an accuracy of 82%. Analysis shows that users organise their concerns by sentiment toward the requesting app rather than specific permission types, with implications for users, developers, and platform administrators.