Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Understanding Privacy-Related Advice on Stack Overflow

Understanding Privacy-Related Advice on Stack Overflow AbstractPrivacy tasks can be challenging for developers, resulting in privacy frameworks and guidelines from the research community which are designed to assist developers in considering privacy features and applying privacy enhancing technologies in early stages of software development. However, how developers engage with privacy design strategies is not yet well understood. In this work, we look at the types of privacy-related advice developers give each other and how that advice maps to Hoepman’s privacy design strategies.We qualitatively analyzed 119 privacy-related accepted answers on Stack Overflow from the past five years and extracted 148 pieces of advice from these answers. We find that the advice is mostly around compliance with regulations and ensuring confidentiality with a focus on the inform, hide, control, and minimize of the Hoepman’s privacy design strategies. Other strategies, abstract, separate, enforce, and demonstrate, are rarely advised. Answers often include links to official documentation and online articles, highlighting the value of both official documentation and other informal materials such as blog posts. We make recommendations for promoting the under-stated strategies through tools, and detail the importance of providing better developer support to handle third-party data practices. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies de Gruyter

Understanding Privacy-Related Advice on Stack Overflow

Download PDF
18 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/de-gruyter/understanding-privacy-related-advice-on-stack-overflow-KicEbRdyPr
Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
© 2022 Mohammad Tahaei et al., published by Sciendo
ISSN
2299-0984
eISSN
2299-0984
DOI
10.2478/popets-2022-0038
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

AbstractPrivacy tasks can be challenging for developers, resulting in privacy frameworks and guidelines from the research community which are designed to assist developers in considering privacy features and applying privacy enhancing technologies in early stages of software development. However, how developers engage with privacy design strategies is not yet well understood. In this work, we look at the types of privacy-related advice developers give each other and how that advice maps to Hoepman’s privacy design strategies.We qualitatively analyzed 119 privacy-related accepted answers on Stack Overflow from the past five years and extracted 148 pieces of advice from these answers. We find that the advice is mostly around compliance with regulations and ensuring confidentiality with a focus on the inform, hide, control, and minimize of the Hoepman’s privacy design strategies. Other strategies, abstract, separate, enforce, and demonstrate, are rarely advised. Answers often include links to official documentation and online articles, highlighting the value of both official documentation and other informal materials such as blog posts. We make recommendations for promoting the under-stated strategies through tools, and detail the importance of providing better developer support to handle third-party data practices.

Journal

Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies – de Gruyter

Published: Apr 1, 2022

Keywords: software developers; stack overflow; usable privacy; privacy by design; privacy design strategies

There are no references for this article.