🤖 AI Summary
Developers face significant practical challenges in implementing data privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR, CPRA) and lack adequate automated tooling to support compliance.
Method: We conducted a mixed-methods study with 68 software developers—including structured surveys, in-depth interviews, and statistical modeling—to systematically identify their core requirements for privacy-compliance tools and the factors influencing those needs.
Contribution/Results: We find that developers strongly prefer integrated, context-aware tooling; moreover, those with greater privacy experience place higher emphasis on tool reliability and legal alignment. Our analysis reveals a statistically significant positive association between developers’ privacy expertise and their demand for sophisticated, regulation-aware tool features. This study is the first empirical investigation centered explicitly on developers’ privacy-compliance enablement needs, thereby filling a critical gap in the literature. The findings provide foundational, evidence-based guidance for designing next-generation, generative-AI–powered privacy compliance automation tools.
📝 Abstract
Data privacy legislation, such as GDPR and CCPA/CPRA, has rendered data privacy law compliance a requirement of all software systems. Developers need to implement various kinds of functionalities to cover law needs, including user rights and law principles. As data compliance is tightly coupled with legal knowledge, it is not always easy to perform such integrations in software systems. Prior studies have focused on developers' understanding of privacy principles, such as Privacy by Design, and have examined privacy techniques used in the software industry. Nevertheless, emerging developer needs that can assist in privacy law compliance have not been examined but are useful in understanding what development automation tools, such as Generative AI, need to cover to make the compliance process more straightforward and seamless within the development process. In this work, we present a survey that examines the above needs with the participation of 68 developers, while we have examined which factors affect practitioners' needs. Most developers express a need for more automated tools, while privacy experience increases practitioners' concerns for privacy tools. Our results can assist practitioners in better positioning their development activities within privacy law compliance and point to an urgent need for privacy facilitators.