Crossing Margins: Intersectional Users' Ethical Concerns about Software

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Olson, Lauren, Humbert, Tom P., Fischer, Ricarda Anna-Lena, Westerveld, Bob, Kunneman, Florian, Guzmán, Emitzá
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Olson, Lauren
Humbert, Tom P.
Fischer, Ricarda Anna-Lena
Westerveld, Bob
Kunneman, Florian
Guzmán, Emitzá
author_facet Olson, Lauren
Humbert, Tom P.
Fischer, Ricarda Anna-Lena
Westerveld, Bob
Kunneman, Florian
Guzmán, Emitzá
contents Many modern software applications present numerous ethical concerns due to conflicts between users' values and companies' priorities. Intersectional communities, those with multiple marginalized identities, are disproportionately affected by these ethical issues, leading to legal, financial, and reputational issues for software companies, as well as real-world harm for intersectional users. Historically, the voices of intersectional communities have been systematically marginalized and excluded from contributing their unique perspectives to software design, perpetuating software-related ethical concerns. This work aims to fill the gap in research on intersectional users' software-related perspectives and provide software practitioners with a starting point to address their ethical concerns. We aggregated and analyzed the intersectional users' ethical concerns over time and developed a prioritization method to identify critical concerns. To achieve this, we collected posts from over 700 intersectional subreddits discussing software applications, utilized deep learning to identify ethical concerns in these posts, and employed state-of-the-art techniques to analyze their content in relation to time and priority. Our findings revealed that intersectional communities report \textit{critical} complaints related to cyberbullying, inappropriate content, and discrimination, highlighting significant flaws in modern software, particularly for intersectional users. Based on these findings, we discuss how to better address the ethical concerns of intersectional users in software development.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_08090
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Crossing Margins: Intersectional Users' Ethical Concerns about Software
Olson, Lauren
Humbert, Tom P.
Fischer, Ricarda Anna-Lena
Westerveld, Bob
Kunneman, Florian
Guzmán, Emitzá
Software Engineering
Human-Computer Interaction
Many modern software applications present numerous ethical concerns due to conflicts between users' values and companies' priorities. Intersectional communities, those with multiple marginalized identities, are disproportionately affected by these ethical issues, leading to legal, financial, and reputational issues for software companies, as well as real-world harm for intersectional users. Historically, the voices of intersectional communities have been systematically marginalized and excluded from contributing their unique perspectives to software design, perpetuating software-related ethical concerns. This work aims to fill the gap in research on intersectional users' software-related perspectives and provide software practitioners with a starting point to address their ethical concerns. We aggregated and analyzed the intersectional users' ethical concerns over time and developed a prioritization method to identify critical concerns. To achieve this, we collected posts from over 700 intersectional subreddits discussing software applications, utilized deep learning to identify ethical concerns in these posts, and employed state-of-the-art techniques to analyze their content in relation to time and priority. Our findings revealed that intersectional communities report \textit{critical} complaints related to cyberbullying, inappropriate content, and discrimination, highlighting significant flaws in modern software, particularly for intersectional users. Based on these findings, we discuss how to better address the ethical concerns of intersectional users in software development.
title Crossing Margins: Intersectional Users' Ethical Concerns about Software
topic Software Engineering
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.08090