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.

中文翻译：

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“追踪一举一动”：分析 GitHub README 文件中开发者的隐私话语


我们采用社会物质视角来研究开发人员如何将隐私作为一种社会价值转化为用户应用程序。我们对开发者隐私研究的全面调查强调了他们作为隐私调解者的关键地位，以及他们的论坛作为对其话语进行不引人注目的研究的富有成效的环境。开源代码共享平台GitHub既有话语又有代码；通过关注 GitHub，我们分析了 2008 年至 2020 年间创建的近 60,000 个包含“隐私”一词的 README 文件，定量和定性研究话语如何转化为代码。使用 VOSviewer.com，我们确定了两个主要词簇：“安全”和“隐私政策”。 Voyant-tools.org 证实了这些调查结果，表明一些参考文献详细阐述了保护隐私的做法，而另一些参考文献则将政策作为遵守公共法规和（讽刺的是）商业法规的一种手段进行讨论。仔细阅读这些文件就会发现，即使是隐私爱好者也可能会无意中推广对隐私构成威胁的代码。