Evaluating Privacy Questions From Stack Overflow: Can ChatGPT Compete?

TL;DR

This study analyzes privacy-related questions on Stack Overflow and compares human responses with ChatGPT's answers, finding ChatGPT provides correct responses for over half of the questions, but slightly less accurate than human answers overall.

Contribution

It offers a comparative evaluation of ChatGPT's ability to address privacy questions against traditional Stack Overflow responses, highlighting its potential as an alternative.

Findings

ChatGPT correctly answers about 56% of privacy questions.

Most privacy questions concern choice, consent, aggregation, and identification.

Stack Overflow responses are slightly more accurate than ChatGPT for some questions.

Abstract

Stack Overflow and other similar forums are used commonly by developers to seek answers for their software development as well as privacy-related concerns. Recently, ChatGPT has been used as an alternative to generate code or produce responses to developers' questions. In this paper, we aim to understand developers' privacy challenges by evaluating the types of privacy-related questions asked on Stack Overflow. We then conduct a comparative analysis between the accepted responses given by Stack Overflow users and the responses produced by ChatGPT for those extracted questions to identify if ChatGPT could serve as a viable alternative. Our results show that most privacy-related questions are related to choice/consent, aggregation, and identification. Furthermore, our findings illustrate that ChatGPT generates similarly correct responses for about 56% of questions, while for the rest of the responses, the answers from Stack Overflow are slightly more accurate than ChatGPT.