How developers make design decisions about Users’ Privacy: The place of professional communities and organizational climate

By: Ayalon O., Toch E., Hadar I., Birnhack M.
Published in: CSCW 2017 – Companion of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
SDGs : SDG 13  |  Units: Social Sciences  | Time: 2017 |  Link
Description: New technologies continuously challenge people’s information privacy, while privacy protection practices, such as Privac y-by-Design, did not become widespread engineering practices. The difficulty of designing privacy-preserving information systems highlights the need for studying developers’ privacy decision-making processes, as the developers’ communities are well coordinated and they are the ones who can promote or hinder privacy in the systems they design. We conducted an online survey (n=101), to understand the effectors on developers’ professional privacy attitudes and practices. We investigate whether developer’s privacy decision-making is shaped by several factors, including organizational (organizational privacy climate, business and legal contexts), professional (privacy knowledge) and personal (personal perceived privacy).