“A method like this would be overkill”: Developers’ Perceived Issues with Privacy-preserving Computation Methods

According to the European General Data Protection Regulation and the principle of Privacy-by-design developers should embed methods of privacy protection into their projects at an early stage. However, studies show that developers are either lacking the tools or the training to apply the appropriate methods. Hence, to ensure the development of privacy-preserving software it is important to understand developers’ issues with methods of privacy-preserving computation. To this end, we have sent a questionnaire to 407 participants with diverse backgrounds to investigate their perceptions of privacy in general and of the methods k-anonymity, differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, and secure multi-party computation in particular. We compared the results to developers’ issues on Stack Overflow. We observe that raising the awareness about these methods increases developers’ willingness to use them in the future. We also validate previously known privacy-related issues developers face. Including privacy-preserving methods in programming education and, thereby, raising developers’ awareness could therefore enhance the privacy protection of software products.