“Track every move”: Analyzing developers’ privacy discourse in GitHub README files

Keren Levi-Eshkol; Rivka Ribak

doi:10.1177/14614448241270541

“Track every move”: Analyzing developers’ privacy discourse in GitHub README files

Department of Communication

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

We adopt a socio-material perspective to examine how developers translate privacy, as a social value, into user applications. Our comprehensive survey of the research on developers’ privacy highlights their key position as privacy mediators and their forums as productive settings for unobtrusive studies of their discourse. The open-source code-sharing platform GitHub contains both discourse and code; by focusing on GitHub, we analyzed nearly 60,000 README files created between 2008 and 2020 that include the term “privacy,” studying quantitatively and qualitatively how discourse is translated into code. Using VOSviewer.com, we identified two main word clusters: “security” and “privacy policy.” Voyant-tools.org confirmed these findings, suggesting that some references elaborate on practices that safeguard privacy, while others discuss policy as a means of complying with both public and, ironically, commercial regulations. A closer reading of the files reveals that even privacy enthusiasts may inadvertently promote code that poses threats to privacy.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	6534-6550
Number of pages	17
Journal	New Media and Society
Volume	27
Issue number	12
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241270541
State	Published - Dec 2025

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2024. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

Keywords

Developers
GitHub
README files
hybrid method
privacy by design
privacy policy

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Communication
Sociology and Political Science

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10.1177/14614448241270541

Cite this

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abstract = "We adopt a socio-material perspective to examine how developers translate privacy, as a social value, into user applications. Our comprehensive survey of the research on developers{\textquoteright} privacy highlights their key position as privacy mediators and their forums as productive settings for unobtrusive studies of their discourse. The open-source code-sharing platform GitHub contains both discourse and code; by focusing on GitHub, we analyzed nearly 60,000 README files created between 2008 and 2020 that include the term “privacy,” studying quantitatively and qualitatively how discourse is translated into code. Using VOSviewer.com, we identified two main word clusters: “security” and “privacy policy.” Voyant-tools.org confirmed these findings, suggesting that some references elaborate on practices that safeguard privacy, while others discuss policy as a means of complying with both public and, ironically, commercial regulations. A closer reading of the files reveals that even privacy enthusiasts may inadvertently promote code that poses threats to privacy.",

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“Track every move”: Analyzing developers’ privacy discourse in GitHub README files

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Access to Document

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