Abstract Software is a crucial component of modern everyday life. However, ethical issues in software, such as privacy issues, censorship and behavior manipulation are prevalent in software applications. To develop ethical software, it is essential to understand the ethical concerns of its end-users. To provide these insights, we conducted a survey among 725 participants and analyze which ethical concerns they have regarding software and why, as well as the actions they are willing to take when confronted with ethical issues in software. The results indicate that privacy, scam and misinformation are important ethical concerns for the wide majority, with scam prompting the strongest reaction in all unethical software scenarios. Reasons for these concerns included—but are not limited to—the exposure of personal sensitive information, perceived societal harm and fear of material loss. The most common reactions to ethical issues in software are to stop using the software and encourage friends and family to do the same. We also find that perceived importance and reactions to unethical scenarios in software products varies significantly by gender, education, and continent.

Software is an integral part of modern everyday life. However, recent ethical issues in software, such as privacy issues, censorship and behaviour manipulation are prevalent in software applications. To develop ethical software, it is crucial to understand the ethical concerns of its end-users. To provide these insights, we conducted a survey among 511 participants and analyze which ethical concerns they have regarding software and why. The results indicate that privacy and scam are important ethical concerns for the majority. Reasons included—but not limited to—are the exposure of personal sensitive information and fear of material loss. Our results show that end-users’ gender and education level significantly influence the perceived importance of several ethical concerns. Moreover, whether someone is from the Global North or Global South significantly influences how one would respond when faced with an ethical issue.

From airports to banks, healthcare, space crafts, and even amazon services, technology impacts almost every aspect of today’s life. If wrongdoings occur within or in relation to technology, they can have big implications on individuals, groups of people, or society as a whole. Whistleblowers are insiders who expose such wrongdoings— eventually stopping misconducts, such as fraud, endangerment to public health and safety, or damage to the environment. Twitter is a microblogging service that allows millions of users to share their views with people distributed all over the world on a daily basis. Tweets have the potential to contain useful information about whistleblowing in tech, from the general public and whistleblowers. However, until now this point has not been researched.To fill this gap, we conducted an exploratory study on technology-related whistleblowing tweets by manually analysing tweets, utilising descriptive statistics, and machine learning techniques. We mined 7,400 tweets from whistleblowers themselves, as well as news and opinions about certain whistleblowers and whistleblowing cases. Although our results show that only 30% of the tweets in our sample dataset (obtained through specific search terms) contained relevant information about whistleblowing in technology, our analysis shows that tweets provide valuable information for both researchers and companies to understand the public opinion regarding whistleblowing cases. Furthermore, we found that machine learning techniques are promising means for extracting information about whistleblowing in tech from the vast stream of tweets.