Behavioral Economics Issues for Software Requirements Optimization for Personal Data Security and Privacy

The effects of psychological, cognitive, emotional, cultural and social factors on the decisions of users and service providers for online service delivery are important factors to take into consideration in designing software applications. Increasing preference of online service delivery is also raising concerns about personal data security and privacy. Hence, there is a need for optimally trading off ease of use and extra measures for ensuring data privacy and security issues. Within this context, behavioral economics is one of the major factors in determining outcomes and successes of underlying software applications. Although much research done on behavioral economics separately, however, behavioral economics is mostly unexplored in the field of software requirements engineering process. With the growing needs of personal data security and privacy concerns, the software community needs to adapt it to software requirements optimization to incorporate and prioritize requirements related to personal data security and privacy. In this study, our main objective is to explore the behavioral economics issues towards data security and privacy and adapt them into the software requirement process. We have proposed a score-based framework. The ultimate goal of this framework is to help companies maximize the benefit and minimize the cost of software products while adapting the data security and privacy requirements in the requirement engineering process.