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

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.