Analysis of COVID-19 Gov PK app user reviews to determine online privacy concerns of Pakistani citizens

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the reaction of Pakistani citizens toward online privacy in the context of the Pakistan Government's COVID-19 app privacy breach. Design/methodology/approach The authors implemented supervised and unsupervised machine learning methods, that is, topic modeling and sentiment analysis on Google app store user review data. Findings There was no visible concern shown by the citizens toward the COVID-19 app privacy breach, even though it was well highlighted in the news. Other studies have also indicated that concern for online privacy remains low in developing countries, which aligns with the findings of this paper. Originality/value Globally COVID-19 apps have been a cause of concern in terms of public privacy. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first in the Pakistani context to show the impact of a well-document privacy breach of a government COVID-19 app.