Investigating Privacy Design Frameworks for Mobile Applications: The Developers’ Perspective
2023 (English) Independent thesis Advanced level (degree of Master (Two Years)), 80 credits / 120 HE credits
Student thesis
Abstract [en]
Nowadays, humans have become dependent on mobile apps for all aspects of their life. This means that apps are used more and more in everyday life, which has led to a boost in mobile app development. However, a big aspect of mobile apps is user privacy. Having a more digitalized society means that privacy plays a huge role in people’s everyday lives and users are becoming increasingly more concerned about it. What’s interesting about this topic is how privacy is actually designed when developing a new mobile application. This means that it all comes down to the mobile app developers and the privacy design frameworks that they use. This research paper focuses on privacy design for mobile app development and investigates how mobile app developers experience adopting and implementing the existing privacy design frameworks. This paper also investigates the barriers of adoption that developers might face. In other words, mobile app developers are interviewed in order to gather a deeper understanding on how those frameworks are adopted and implemented, if at all, and what adoption barriers could exist. In order to investigate the adoption barriers, the diffusion of innovation theory was used and specifically the innovation decision process. This theory combines the technical and social aspects that are crucial when investigating this topic. The results showcased a number of barriers that could be resolved by the different parties involved, such as the companies, the framework creators, as well as the developers themselves. The results also highlighted that the innovation decision process is not linear, because some of the stages are skipped when it comes to the adoption of the privacy design frameworks.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages 2023. , p. 75
Keywords [en]
Privacy by Design, mobile applications, privacy design frameworks, mobile app developers, diffusion of innovation theory, innovation decision process, framework adoption barriers
National Category
Information Systems
Identifiers URN: urn:nbn:se:ltu:diva-98541 OAI: oai:DiVA.org:ltu-98541 DiVA, id: diva2:1769461
Subject / course Student thesis, at least 30 credits
Educational program Information Security, master's level (120 credits)
Supervisors
Examiners
2023-06-272023-06-162023-06-27 Bibliographically approved