Understanding Privacy-Related Questions on Stack Overflow

We analyse Stack Overflow (SO) to understand challenges and confusions developers face while dealing with privacy-related topics. We apply topic modelling techniques to 1,733 privacy related questions to identify topics and then qualitatively analyse a random sample of 315 privacy-related questions. Identified topics include privacy policies, privacy concerns, access control, and version changes. Results show that developers do ask SO for support on privacy-related issues. We also find that platforms such as Apple and Google are defining privacy requirements for developers by specifying what “sensitive” information is and what types of information developers need to communicate to users (e.g. privacy policies). We also examine the accepted answers in our sample and find that 28% of them link to official documentation and more than half are answered by SO users without references to any external resources.

In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems