Software practitioners use online forums to navigate complex and often ambiguous legal privacy requirements, yet little is known about their professional backgrounds, what challenges they face, and how they use and assess the credibility of the advice received, or how they resolve ambiguities in posts. We report the findings of a survey of 223 Reddit users from regulatory-focused subreddits, complemented by a qualitative analysis of 2,248 posts and responses. Our results show that, despite holding privacy-related certifications, most participants frequently use forums to seek legal advice. Key challenges reported or identified include implementing a data protection impact assessment, reporting a data breach, and obtaining cookie consent. Reddit users often assess credibility by reviewing respondents' post history, verifying sources cited, trusting advice from recognized experts, and following up for clarity before responding. We highlight research and educational directions to bridge gaps in support needed for regulatory compliance guidance.
Developers' choices about what data a system collects, how it is used and shared, and what defaults govern user choices directly shape users' privacy experiences. Yet, developers often make problematic privacy-related design decisions without realizing the potential consequences.…
AI coding agents are rapidly reshaping how software is built, with developers increasingly delegating substantial coding tasks to autonomous agents in pursuit of higher productivity. While these gains are real, they come at the cost of incidental learning. Developers historically…
Prompt engineering has emerged as a critical yet undertaught skill for software developers, one that traditional learning approaches are ill-equipped to support given its evolving, interactive, and context-dependent nature. In this paper, we introduce Prompt Coach (PC), an agenti…
Large language models are increasingly used by participants on crowdsourcing platforms when responding to surveys, potentially undermining the validity of collected data. Our study aims to quantify the prevalence of this behavior and investigate methods to detect and prevent it.…
AI coding agents set up projects by reading documentation and installing the dependencies it lists, without verifying their names, sources, or known vulnerabilities. By editing only a README, requirements file, or Makefile, an attacker can redirect the agent to an untrusted regis…
Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, while serving as a foundational enabler for modern social media and digital health services, exert a bivalent effect by simultaneously acting as a combatant against and a spread vector for misinformation. A prevalent challenge in mitigat…