Materializing Privacy in Local and Global Developer Communities: Developers’ Perspectives

This project explores how ideas about information privacy are translated into code – how local informational norms and practices take tangible form in global software products. This issue has recently been addressed through studies of developers. However, with few notable exceptions, this emergent body of research tends to regard developers as a generic professional category and overlook their cultural specificity, failing to acknowledge the pervasiveness of “not Silicon Valley” developers. Adopting a trans-local perspective, I draw on interviews with developers in Israel and Germany, seeking to disentangle flows of ideas about information privacy in both physical and virtual peripheral encounters.