Evaluating Privacy Questions From Stack Overflow: Can ChatGPT Compete?
This work addresses developers' privacy concerns by evaluating if ChatGPT can serve as an alternative to forums like Stack Overflow, though it is incremental in comparing existing tools.
The paper analyzed privacy-related questions on Stack Overflow to understand developers' challenges and compared ChatGPT's responses to accepted answers, finding that ChatGPT was similarly correct for about 56% of questions, with Stack Overflow answers being slightly more accurate for the rest.
Stack Overflow and other similar forums are used commonly by developers to seek answers for their software development as well as privacy-related concerns. Recently, ChatGPT has been used as an alternative to generate code or produce responses to developers' questions. In this paper, we aim to understand developers' privacy challenges by evaluating the types of privacy-related questions asked on Stack Overflow. We then conduct a comparative analysis between the accepted responses given by Stack Overflow users and the responses produced by ChatGPT for those extracted questions to identify if ChatGPT could serve as a viable alternative. Our results show that most privacy-related questions are related to choice/consent, aggregation, and identification. Furthermore, our findings illustrate that ChatGPT generates similarly correct responses for about 56% of questions, while for the rest of the responses, the answers from Stack Overflow are slightly more accurate than ChatGPT.