Linking Platforms, Practices, and Developer Ethics: Levers for Privacy Discourse in Mobile Application Development

Abstract

Privacy is a critical challenge for corporate social responsibility in the mobile device ecosystem. Mobile application firms can collect granular and largely unregulated data about their consumers, and must make ethical decisions about how and whether to collect, store, and share these data. This paper conducts a discourse analysis of mobile application developer forums to discover when and how privacy conversations, as a representative of larger ethical debates, arise during development. It finds that online forums can be useful spaces for ethical deliberations, as developers use these spaces to define, discuss, and justify their values. It also discovers that ethical discussions in mobile development are prompted by work practices which vary considerably between iOS and Android, today's two major mobile platforms. For educators, regulators, and managers interested in encouraging more ethical discussion and deliberation in mobile development, these work practices provide a valuable point of entry. But while the triggers for privacy conversations are quite different between platforms, ultimately the justifications for privacy are similar. Developers for both platforms use moral and cautionary tales, moral evaluation, and instrumental and technical rationalization to justify and legitimize privacy as a value in mobile development. Understanding these three forms of justification for privacy is useful to educators, regulators, and managers who wish to promote ethical practices in mobile development.

Understanding Privacy-Related Questions on Stack Overflow

“…These results are similar to a study that was carried out 15 years previous, which indicates stagnation in engineer's mindsets [17]. Beyond interviews, a discourse analysis of two mobile developer forums for privacy relevant conversations found that developers of these forums were concerned about how third-parties are collecting data, the privacy implications of features requested by end-users, and the legal consequences of their actions [60].…”

Engineering Privacy by Design: Are engineers ready to live up to the challenge?

“…They concluded that developer forums such as the iPhoneDevSDK forum and the Android XDA forums act as quasi-regulators, setting privacy expectations for applications to be published on their platform stores and thereby guiding app developers' privacy efforts. A complementary study showed that certain work practices, such as navigating the platform's approval or user requests, can act as levers for privacy discourse, triggering larger debates on privacy and ethical requirements in general (Shilton and Greene 2017).…”

Business and the Ethical Implications of Technology: Introduction to the Symposium

“…Some values in design scholarship analyzes technologies themselves to understand values that they do, or don't, support well (Brey 2000;Friedman and Nissenbaum 1996;Winner 1980). Other ViD scholars study the people developing technologies to understand their human and organizational motivations and the ways those relate to design decisions (Spiekdermann et al 2018;JafariNaimi et al 2015;Manders-Huits and Zimmer 2009;Shilton 2018;Shilton and Greene 2019). A third stream of ViD scholarship builds new technologies that purposefully center particular human values or ethics (Friedman et al 2017).…”