Understanding Privacy-Related Questions on Stack Overflow

Abstract

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 privacyrelated 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.

“Developers Are Responsible”: What Ad Networks Tell Developers About Privacy

“…Developers may have privacy concerns for users and look for options that can protect user privacy [11,45,48,50]. For example, when given the option, developers chose coarse over fne grain location information [21]; suggesting that developers do consider privacy.…”

“…Furthermore, developers' user privacy attitudes and actions may contradict; while they may say that they care about user privacy, their decisions and fnal app may not be privacy favourable [30]. Developer concerns about privacy are refected in questions they ask on Stack Overfow [48], and given the options, they pick more privacy-preserving alternatives [21]. Developers tend to follow guidelines and requirements provided by the platforms [38,48].…”

A comprehensive study on challenges in deploying deep learning based software

“…This category includes questions about basic concepts or background knowledge related to DL software deployment, such as "is there any di erence between these Neural Network Classi er and Neural Network in machine learning model type used in iOS " [8]. This category of questions is also observed in previous work [72,75,98] that analyzes challenges faced by developers in other topics through SO questions. For Server/Cloud and Mobile, this category accounts for 4.4% and 4.8%, respectively, indicating that developers nd even the basics of DL software deployment challenging.…”

“…Selection of data source. Similar to previous studies [72,74,75,90,96,98,105,106], our work uses SO as the only data source to study the challenges that developers encounter. As a result, we may overlook valuable insights from other sources.…”

Data Comics for Reporting Controlled User Studies in Human-Computer Interaction

“…Their respective studies involved a controlled study in data visualization (GeoInf, [52]), an analysis of online open human data. (SecPriv [73]; CompPsy, [25]), observational animal data and model- Our data was highly skewed, so we used a logarithmic transformation. Fig.…”