Analyzing developer discussions on EU and US privacy legislation compliance in GitHub repositories

Context: Privacy legislation has impacted the way software systems are developed, prompting practitioners to update their implementations. Specifically, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) have forced the community to focus on users’ data privacy. Objectives: Relying on the vast amount of data on developer issues available in GitHub repositories, our aim is to gather empirical evidence on the issues developers of Open Source Software discuss to comply with privacy legislation. Method: We examined such discussions by mining and analyzing 32,820 issues from GitHub repositories. We partially analyzed the dataset automatically to identify law user rights and principles indicated, and manually analyzed a sample of 1186 issues based on the type of concern addressed. Results: We devised 24 discussion categories placed in six clusters: user rights and consent, compliance implementation, documentation, data storing/sharing, general compliance, and contextual adaptability. Developers mainly focus on specific user rights from the legislation (right to erasure, right to opt-out, right to access), addressing other rights less frequently, while most discussions concern user consent, user rights functionality, bugs and cookie management. Conclusion: The created taxonomy can help practitioners understand which issues are discussed for law compliance, so that they ensure they address them first in their systems. In addition, the educational community can reshape curricula to better educate future engineers on the privacy law concerns raised, and the research community can identify gaps and areas for improvement to support and accelerate data privacy law compliance.