Stack Overflow

Developers are users too and they are impacted by many of the same usability issues that plague users. In this project we look at how developers engage with privacy and think about ways to better support them in doing so.

We look at the types of privacy-related advice developers give each other on StackOverflow 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.

We analyse Stack Overflow to understand challenges and confusions developers face while dealing with privacy-related topics. Identified topics include privacy policies, privacy concerns, access control, and version changes. Results show that developers do ask Stack Overflow 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.