The whos, whats, and whys of issues related to personal data and data protection in open-source projects on GitHub
Anne Henning, Lukas Schulte, Steffen Herbold, Oksana Kulyk, Peter Mayer

TL;DR
This study analyzes how data protection regulations like GDPR influence discussions and issue resolution in open-source GitHub projects, revealing increased privacy-related discussions and identifying key roles involved.
Contribution
It provides the first empirical analysis of how data protection regulations impact issue discussions and resolutions in open-source software development on GitHub.
Findings
Significant increase in privacy-related issue reporting after GDPR implementation.
Feature requests for privacy enhancements are the most common issue type.
Most privacy issues are resolved without opposition.
Abstract
Data protection regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the US affect how software may handle the personal data of its users. Prior literature focused on how data protection regulations are discussed for software in operation, or how this topic is discussed in various channels outside of the software development process. Yet, what is missing, is a perspective on the impact of such regulations on the software development process. In our work, we address this gap, and explore how discussions during the development of software are impacted by regulations, who reports and discusses issues related to personal data and data protection, and how developers react to those issues. To that end, we used inductive coding to analyze 652 issues from Open Source GitHub projects and used the codes to…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsPrivacy, Security, and Data Protection · Advanced Malware Detection Techniques · Information and Cyber Security
