Translating privacy: developer cultures in the global world of practice

ABSTRACT

This paper makes the case for considering the role of cross-cultural encounters in shaping developers’ notions of information privacy. Recent studies on privacy by design shed light on developer practices yet tend to regard these workers as a generic category. The paper draws on two interviews with workers in a late-stage Israeli startup as a step toward localizing developers and the global products they design. The analysis identifies four narratives that juxtapose the local, the global and the commodification of users’ personal information: (1) the origin myth of the company; (2) workers’ personal and professional biographies; (3) reports on external regulations; and (4) accounts of work practices, rituals and communication formats. The analysis suggests how the globalization of the startup was implicated in changing ideas and practices relating to users’ information. The paper concludes by discussing some of the challenges facing a culturally-sensitive study of developers as mediators of privacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Developers
• privacy
• globalization
• regulation
• cross-cultural organizations
• algorithms

Acknowledgement

The author thanks Daniel Yusufov for her invaluable assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr. Rivka Ribak is a senior lecturer in the Department of Communication at the University of Haifa. She studies media use and nonuse in different cultural contexts and emergent practices of digitization and photography. Her most recent project explores how vernacular practices are translated into code.

Notes

1. Directive, EU (1995). 95/46/EC. Protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data. Official Journal of the EC, 23(6).

2. Company and informants' names, and any other identifying information, were changed. The information is based on a report in the Hebrew newspaper Globes, July 2018.

3. The quotes are translated from Hebrew. Words said in English are italicized to flag the use of English in the conversation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Center for Cyber Law and Policy at the University of Haifa.