Anonymity in Developer Communities: Insights from Developer Perceptions and Stack Overflow Profiles

This thesis consists of two studies: an interview study with 34 early-career developers and a mining study analyzing 130,000 developer profiles. The interview study examines developers' definitions of anonymity, their preferences for anonymity, and their engagement with privacy policies. It also explores whether presenting privacy policies using contextual integrity principles improves understanding of the privacy policies. The developers from the interview study defined anonymity as withholding identifiable information like name, location, and professional background. The mining study investigates how much information developers share across platforms and the ease of retrieving their professional profiles. Our findings show that using Stack Overflow location and screen name in LinkedIn searches narrows down profiles, but cross-linking Stack Overflow profile data information with GitHub or Twitter adds noise. This research provides valuable insights into how developers define anonymity, and how that affects their behaviour when using social coding platforms.