Lessons Learned From Recruiting Participants With Programming Skills for Empirical Privacy and Security Studies

In the past decade the usable privacy and security research community has extended its research to expert users such as software developers who have been shown to face challenges when working with privacy and security technologies. However, it is often challenging to run empirical studies with developers because they can be hard to recruit for interviews or surveys. Researchers have successfully used social media, crowdsourcing platforms, and computer science students for recruiting, but recruitment is still a significant pain point in many studies. This short paper reflects on our experience recruiting developers, particularly for empirical privacy and security research, for multiple studies from 2019 to 2022.