Towards a new era of mass data collection: Assessing pandemic surveillance technologies to preserve user privacy

Software development teams are responsible for making and implementing software design decisions that directly impact end-user privacy, a challenging task to do well. Privacy Champions—people who strongly care about advocating privacy—play a useful role in supporting privacy-respecting development cultures. To understand their motivations, challenges, and strategies for protecting end-user privacy, we conducted 12 interviews with Privacy Champions in software development teams. We find that common barriers to implementing privacy in software design include: negative privacy culture, internal prioritisation tensions, limited tool support, unclear evaluation metrics, and technical complexity. To promote privacy, Privacy Champions regularly use informal discussions, management support, communication among stakeholders, and documentation and guidelines. They perceive code reviews and practical training as more instructive than general privacy awareness and on-boarding training. Our study is a first step towards understanding how Privacy Champions work to improve their organisation’s privacy approaches and improve the privacy of end-user products.

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Privacy Champions in Software Teams: Understanding Their Motivations, Strategies, and Challenges

Driven by data proliferation, digital technologies have transformed the marketing landscape. In parallel, significant privacy concerns have shaken consumer-firm relationships, prompting changes in both regulatory interventions and people's own privacy-protective behaviors. With a comprehensive analysis of digital technologies and data strategy informed by structuration theory and privacy literature, the authors consider privacy tensions as the product of firm-consumer interactions, facilitated by digital technologies. This perspective in turn implies distinct consumer, regulatory, and firm responses related to data protection. By consolidating various perspectives, the authors propose three tenets and seven propositions, supported by interview insights from senior managers and consumer informants, that create a foundation for understanding the digital technology implications for firm performance in contexts marked by growing privacy worries and legal ramifications. On the basis of this conceptual framework, they also propose a data strategy typology across two main strategic functions of digital technologies: data monetization and data sharing. The result is four distinct types of firms, which engage in disparate behaviors in the broader ecosystem pertaining to privacy issues. This article also provides directions for research, according to a synthesis of findings from both academic and practical perspectives. 

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Bin Jiang

Papers

Motivating information system engineers’ acceptance of Privacy by Design in China: An extended UTAUT model

“Privacy by Design” implementation: Information system engineers’ perspective