Integrating PETs into Software Applications: A Game-Based Learning Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces PETs-101, a game-based learning framework designed to motivate software developers to integrate Privacy Enhancing Technologies into their applications, addressing knowledge gaps and promoting privacy-preserving development.

Contribution

It presents a novel game-based educational approach tailored for developers to effectively learn and implement PETs in software development.

Findings

Framework aims to improve developer behaviour towards PETs

Future empirical evaluation planned

Lays foundation for educational gaming interventions

Abstract

The absence of data protection measures in software applications leads to data breaches, threatening end-user privacy and causing instabilities in organisations that developed those software. Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) emerge as promising safeguards against data breaches. PETs minimise threats to personal data while enabling software to extract valuable insights from them. However, software developers often lack the adequate knowledge and awareness to develop PETs integrated software. This issue is exacerbated by insufficient PETs related learning approaches customised for software developers. Therefore, we propose "PETs-101", a novel game-based learning framework that motivates developers to integrate PETs into software. By doing so, it aims to improve developers' privacy-preserving software development behaviour rather than simply delivering the learning content on PETs. In future, the proposed framework will be empirically investigated and used as a foundation for developing an educational gaming intervention that trains developers to put PETs into practice.