Security but not for security’s sake : The impact of social considerations on app developers’ choices

Rauf, Irum and van der Linden, Dirk and Levine, Mark and Towse, John and Nuseibeh, Bashar and Rashid, Awais (2020) Security but not for security’s sake : The impact of social considerations on app developers’ choices. In: ICSEW'20 : Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), New York, 141–144. ISBN 9781450379632

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Abstract

We explore a dataset of app developer reasoning to better under- stand the reasons that may inadvertently promote or demote app developers’ prioritization of security. We identify a number of rea- sons: caring vs. fear of users, the impact of norms, and notions of ‘otherness’ and ‘self’ in terms of belonging to groups. Based on our preliminary findings, we propose an interdisciplinary research agenda to explore the impact of social identity (a psychological theory) on developers’ security rationales, and how this could be leveraged to guide developers towards making more secure choices.