Privacy Detective: A Narrative Game that Cultivates Student Developers' Privacy Awareness by Harnessing Legal Documents

arXiv:2607.09022 · cs.HC, cs.CR, cs.CY · Submitted 2026-07-10 · Read on arXiv

Shao-Yu Chu, Jennifer Forsyth, Xu Wang, Haojian Jin

cs.HC, cs.CR, cs.CY

Submitted: 2026-07-10

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

The gist: 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.

Terminology

Federal Trade Commission — 6× in this paper
Calibration — 4× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
Core — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Abstraction — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
Cognitive Load — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Actor — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Adaptation — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
Affordance — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
Benchmark — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Clustering — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Digital Twin — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
Frustration — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Generalizability — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
Generative AI — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Grounding — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Personalization — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Scaffolding — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes

Abstract

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. We introduce Privacy Detective, a narrative investigation game that leverages real-world legal documents to train developers' privacy awareness. In the game, players search for privacy violation evidence derived from legal documents and organize this evidence into privacy violation reports using curated templates. We evaluated Privacy Detective in a between-subjects study with student developers, comparing it against a baseline in which participants read raw FTC legal documents. Participants in the game condition identified more true violations than the baseline group, flagged fewer non-issues, and provided more complete justifications for the violations they reported.

Terminology

Abstract

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