Understanding Developers Privacy Concerns Through Reddit Thread Analysis

TL;DR

This study analyzes Reddit discussions to understand developers' privacy concerns, revealing common themes and how these evolve with new regulations across web and mobile development communities.

Contribution

It provides a large-scale NLP analysis of Reddit threads to uncover developers' privacy perceptions and how they change over time with regulatory developments.

Findings

Identifies common privacy concerns among developers.

Shows differences in privacy topic frequency between web and mobile development.

Tracks evolution of privacy discussions over time.

Abstract

With the growing global emphasis on regulating the protection of personal information and increasing user expectation of the same, developing with privacy in mind is becoming ever more important. In this paper, we study the concerns, questions, and solutions developers discuss on Reddit forums to enhance our understanding of their perceptions and challenges while developing applications in the current privacy-focused world. We perform various forms of Natural Language Processing (NLP) on 437,317 threads from subreddits such as r/webdev, r/androiddev, and r/iOSProgramming to identify both common points of discussion and how these points change over time as new regulations are passed around the globe. Our results show that there are common trends in privacy topics among the different subreddits while the frequency of those topics differs between web and mobile applications.