What is unethical about software? User perceptions in the Netherlands

TL;DR

The paper investigates end-user ethical concerns in software via 19 semi-structured interviews with Dutch residents, addressing active concerns, latent concerns, and user-suggested solutions. Using an interpretive approach and a predefined ethical-concern taxonomy, the study uncovers privacy, transparency, manipulation, safety, and inappropriate content as key active worries, with addiction, censorship, and discrimination emerging when prompted. It highlights six actionable remedies—four internal (clarity, user control, content filtering, safety) and two external (humane governance, regulation)—and emphasizes the need for regulatory tools and epistemic humility in software practice. The findings offer a locally grounded map of concerns to inform designers, policymakers, and researchers about how to align software practices with user values and social well-being.

Abstract

Software has the potential to improve lives. Yet, unethical and uninformed software practices are at the root of an increasing number of ethical concerns. Despite its pervasiveness, few research has analyzed end-users perspectives on the ethical issues of the software they use. We address this gap, and investigate end-user's ethical concerns in software through 19 semi-structured interviews with residents of the Netherlands. We ask a diverse group of users about their ethical concerns when using everyday software applications. We investigate the underlying reasons for their concerns and what solutions they propose to eliminate them. We find that our participants actively worry about privacy, transparency, manipulation, safety and inappropriate content; with privacy and manipulation often being at the center of their worries. Our participants demand software solutions to improve information clarity in applications and provide more control over the user experience. They further expect larger systematic changes within software practices and government regulation.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: Participants and the ethical concerns they report in their answers. In this matrix, the rows represent the participants and their personal background, the columns represent the types of concern. A full circle indicates an active ethical concern. A half circle indicates a concern that arises only when asked about the latent ethical concerns. We characterize participants by coloring heavy software users red and light users green. The letters W and M denote their gender. The flag represents the country they feel most influenced by. Participants' generation is also indicated.
• Figure 2: Co-occurrence counts of ethical concerns. The circles are colored in gray scale, where a lighter gray indicates a higher count. The count of times participants bring up an ethical concern on its own is indicated in the black circles.
• Figure 3: Types of ethical concern and their main themes. A thick line and color show how themes relate to ethical concerns. Dotted lines denote relations between concerns, inferred from our participants' reasoning.