Erasing Labor with Labor: Dark Patterns and Lockstep Behaviors on Google Play
Google Play's policy forbids the use of incentivized installs, ratings, and reviews to manipulate the placement of apps. However, there still exist apps that incentivize installs for other apps on the platform. To understand how install-incentivizing apps affect users, we examine their ecosystem through a socio-technical lens and perform a mixed-methods analysis of their reviews and permissions. Our dataset contains 319K reviews collected daily over five months from 60 such apps that cumulatively account for over 160.5M installs. We perform qualitative analysis of reviews to reveal various types of dark patterns that developers incorporate in install-incentivizing apps, highlighting their no
doi
10.1145/3511095.3536368
name
Erasing Labor with Labor: Dark Patterns and Lockstep Behaviors on Google Play
source
supplied-acm-publisher-html-and-archival-pdf
license
© 2022 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
summary
Google Play's policy forbids the use of incentivized installs, ratings, and reviews to manipulate the placement of apps. However, there still exist apps that incentivize installs for other apps on the platform. To understand how install-incentivizing apps affect users, we examine their ecosystem through a socio-technical lens and perform a mixed-methods analysis of their reviews and permissions. Our dataset contains 319K reviews collected daily over five months from 60 such apps that cumulatively account for over 160.5M installs. We perform qualitative analysis of reviews to reveal various types of dark patterns that developers incorporate in install-incentivizing apps, highlighting their no
acm_source
ACM Digital Library PDF: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3511095.3536368
import_kind
full_text
open_access
false
displayAuthor
Ashwin Singh, Arvindh Arun, Pulak Malhotra, Pooja Desur, Ayushi Jain, Duen Horng Chau, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru
displayPublishTime
2022-06-28
acm_source_attribution
Supplied ACM publisher HTML, verified against authorized ACM archival PDF; complete full-text conversion with page facsimiles.