Privacy and Security Evaluation of Mobile Payment Applications Through User-Generated Reviews

Abstract

Mobile payment applications are crucial to ensure seamless day-to-day digital transactions. However, users' perceived privacy- and security-related concerns are continually rising. Users express such thoughts, complaints, and suggestions through app reviews. To this aim, we collected 1,886,352 reviews from the top 50 mobile payment applications. Furthermore, we conducted a mixed-methods in-depth evaluation of the privacy- and security-related reviews resulting in a total of 163,210 reviews. Finally, we implemented sentiment analysis and did a mixed-methods analysis of the resulting 52,749 negative reviews. Such large-scale evaluation through user reviews informs developers about the user perception of digital threats and app behaviors. Our analysis highlights that users share concerns about sharing sensitive information with the application, confidentiality of their data, and permissions requested by the apps. Users have shown significant concerns regarding the usability of these applications (48.47%), getting locked out of their accounts (38.73%), and being unable to perform successful digital transactions (31.52%). We conclude by providing actionable recommendations to address such user concerns to aid the development of secure and privacy-preserving mobile payment applications.