Narratives: the Unforeseen Influencer of Privacy Concerns

TL;DR

This study analyzes Reddit posts to understand how narratives influence user privacy concerns, revealing that narratives significantly shape privacy discussions and can inform privacy requirement elicitation.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of narratives from economics to explain privacy concern dynamics and demonstrates their impact on user discussions over time.

Findings

Privacy discussions evolve over time and are affected by regulatory events.

Narratives significantly influence what and when users discuss privacy.

Identified 9 main areas of privacy concerns from Reddit posts.

Abstract

Privacy requirements are increasingly growing in importance as new privacy regulations are enacted. To adequately manage privacy requirements, organizations not only need to comply with privacy regulations, but also consider user privacy concerns. In this exploratory study, we used Reddit as a source to understand users' privacy concerns regarding software applications. We collected 4.5 million posts from Reddit and classified 129075 privacy related posts, which is a non-negligible number of privacy discussions. Next, we clustered these posts and identified 9 main areas of privacy concerns. We use the concept of narratives from economics (i.e., posts that can go viral) to explain the phenomenon of what and when users change in their discussion of privacy. We further found that privacy discussions change over time and privacy regulatory events have a short term impact on such discussions. However, narratives have a notable impact on what and when users discussed about privacy. Considering narratives could guide software organizations in eliciting the relevant privacy concerns before developing them as privacy requirements.