SENSOR: An ML-Enhanced Online Annotation Tool to Uncover Privacy Concerns from User Reviews in Social-Media Applications

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Farah, Labiba, Kabir, Mohammad Ridwan, Ahmed, Shohel, Anam, MD Mohaymen Ul, Islam, Md. Sakibul
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Farah, Labiba
Kabir, Mohammad Ridwan
Ahmed, Shohel
Anam, MD Mohaymen Ul
Islam, Md. Sakibul
author_facet Farah, Labiba
Kabir, Mohammad Ridwan
Ahmed, Shohel
Anam, MD Mohaymen Ul
Islam, Md. Sakibul
contents The widespread use of social media applications has raised significant privacy concerns, often highlighted in user reviews. These reviews also provide developers with valuable insights into improving apps by addressing issues and introducing better features. However, the sheer volume and nuanced nature of reviews make manual identification and prioritization of privacy-related concerns challenging for developers. Previous studies have developed software utilities to automatically classify user reviews as privacy-relevant, privacy-irrelevant, bug reports, feature requests, etc., using machine learning. Notably, there is a lack of focus on classifying reviews specifically as privacy-related feature requests, privacy-related bug reports, or privacy-irrelevant. This paper introduces SENtinel SORt (SENSOR), an automated online annotation tool designed to help developers annotate and classify user reviews into these categories. For automating the annotation of such reviews, this paper introduces the annotation model, GRACE (GRU-based Attention with CBOW Embedding), using Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) with Continuous Bag of Words (CBOW) and Attention mechanism. Approximately 16000 user reviews from seven popular social media apps on Google Play Store, including Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook Lite, and Line were analyzed. Two annotators manually labelled the reviews, achieving a Cohen's Kappa value of 0.87, ensuring a labeled dataset with high inter-rater agreement for training machine learning models. Among the models tested, GRACE demonstrated the best performance (macro F1-score: 0.9434, macro ROC-AUC: 0.9934, and accuracy: 95.10%) despite class imbalance. SENSOR demonstrates significant potential to assist developers with extracting and addressing privacy-related feature requests or bug reports from user reviews, enhancing user privacy and trust.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_10640
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SENSOR: An ML-Enhanced Online Annotation Tool to Uncover Privacy Concerns from User Reviews in Social-Media Applications
Farah, Labiba
Kabir, Mohammad Ridwan
Ahmed, Shohel
Anam, MD Mohaymen Ul
Islam, Md. Sakibul
Software Engineering
Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
D.2.2
The widespread use of social media applications has raised significant privacy concerns, often highlighted in user reviews. These reviews also provide developers with valuable insights into improving apps by addressing issues and introducing better features. However, the sheer volume and nuanced nature of reviews make manual identification and prioritization of privacy-related concerns challenging for developers. Previous studies have developed software utilities to automatically classify user reviews as privacy-relevant, privacy-irrelevant, bug reports, feature requests, etc., using machine learning. Notably, there is a lack of focus on classifying reviews specifically as privacy-related feature requests, privacy-related bug reports, or privacy-irrelevant. This paper introduces SENtinel SORt (SENSOR), an automated online annotation tool designed to help developers annotate and classify user reviews into these categories. For automating the annotation of such reviews, this paper introduces the annotation model, GRACE (GRU-based Attention with CBOW Embedding), using Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) with Continuous Bag of Words (CBOW) and Attention mechanism. Approximately 16000 user reviews from seven popular social media apps on Google Play Store, including Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook Lite, and Line were analyzed. Two annotators manually labelled the reviews, achieving a Cohen's Kappa value of 0.87, ensuring a labeled dataset with high inter-rater agreement for training machine learning models. Among the models tested, GRACE demonstrated the best performance (macro F1-score: 0.9434, macro ROC-AUC: 0.9934, and accuracy: 95.10%) despite class imbalance. SENSOR demonstrates significant potential to assist developers with extracting and addressing privacy-related feature requests or bug reports from user reviews, enhancing user privacy and trust.
title SENSOR: An ML-Enhanced Online Annotation Tool to Uncover Privacy Concerns from User Reviews in Social-Media Applications
topic Software Engineering
Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
D.2.2
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10640