Understanding Privacy-Related Advice on Stack Overflow

Privacy tasks can be challenging for developers, resulting in privacy frameworks and guidelines from the research community which are designed to assist developers in considering privacy features and applying privacy enhancing technologies in early stages of software development. However, how developers engage with privacy design strategies is not yet well understood. In this work, we look at the types of privacy-related advice developers give each other 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. Answers often include links to official documentation and online articles, highlighting the value of both official documentation and other informal materials such as blog posts. We make recommendations for promoting the under-stated strategies through tools, and detail the importance of providing better developer support to handle third-party data practices.