An Exploratory Mixed-methods Study on General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance in Open-Source Software
Background: Governments worldwide are considering textit{data privacy regulations}. These laws, such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), require software developers to meet privacy-related requirements when interacting with users’ data. Prior research describes the impact of such laws on software development, but only for commercial software. Although open-source software is commonly integrated into regulated software, and thus must be engineered or adapted for compliance, we do not know how such laws impact open-source software development.
Aims: Understanding how data privacy laws affect open-source software development. We focused on the European Union’s GDPR, as it is the most prominent such law. We specifically investigated how GDPR compliance activities influence OSS developer activity (RQ1), how OSS developers perceive fulfilling GDPR requirements (RQ2), the most challenging GDPR requirements to implement (RQ3), and how OSS developers assess GDPR compliance (RQ4).
Method: We distributed an online survey to explore perceptions of GDPR implementations from open-source developers (N=56). To augment this analysis, we further conducted a repository mining study to analyze development metrics on pull requests (N=31,462) submitted to open-source GitHub repositories.
Results: Our results suggest GDPR policies complicate open-source development processes and introduce challenges for developers, primarily regarding the management of users’ data, implementation costs and time, and assessments of compliance. Moreover, we observed negative perceptions of GDPR from open-source developers and significant increases in development activity, in particular metrics related to coding and reviewing activity, on GitHub pull requests (PRs) related to GDPR compliance.
Conclusions: Our findings provide implications for improving data privacy policies, motivating the need for policy-related resources and automated tools to support data privacy regulation implementation and compliance efforts in open-source software.
Thu 24 OctDisplayed time zone: Brussels, Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris change
11:00 - 12:35 | Open source software and repository miningESEM Technical Papers / ESEM Emerging Results, Vision and Reflection Papers Track at Multimedia (B3 Building - Hall) Chair(s): Davide Taibi University of Oulu | ||
11:00 20mFull-paper | Sustaining Maintenance Labor for Healthy Open Source Software Projects through Human Infrastructure: A Maintainer Perspective ESEM Technical Papers Johan Linåker RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, Georg Link Bitergia, Kevin Lumbard Creighton University | ||
11:20 20mFull-paper | Documenting Ethical Considerations in Open Source AI Models ESEM Technical Papers Haoyu Gao The University of Melbourne, Mansooreh Zahedi The Univeristy of Melbourne, Christoph Treude Singapore Management University, Sarita Rosenstock the University of Melbourne, Marc Cheong the University of Melbourne Pre-print | ||
11:40 20mFull-paper | An Exploratory Mixed-methods Study on General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance in Open-Source Software ESEM Technical Papers Lucas Franke Virginia Tech, Huayu Liang Virginia Tech, Sahar Farzanehpour Virginia Tech, Aaron Brantly Virginia Tech, James C. Davis Purdue University, Chris Brown Virginia Tech Pre-print | ||
12:00 20mFull-paper | An Empirical Study of API Misuses of Data-Centric Libraries ESEM Technical Papers Akalanka Galappaththi University of Alberta, Sarah Nadi New York University Abu Dhabi, University of Alberta, Christoph Treude Singapore Management University Pre-print | ||
12:20 15mVision and Emerging Results | Automatic Categorization of GitHub Actions with Transformers and Few-shot Learning ESEM Emerging Results, Vision and Reflection Papers Track Phuong T. Nguyen University of L’Aquila, Juri Di Rocco University of L'Aquila, Claudio Di Sipio University of L'Aquila, Mudita Shakya University of L'Aquila, Davide Di Ruscio University of L'Aquila, Massimiliano Di Penta University of Sannio, Italy Pre-print | ||