Privacy policy

Disclaimer for participants in our research only. By installing the TaskTracker plugin using our distribution file, you agree to send us changes in code that you make during problem solving.

The TaskTracker plugin tracks changes only in the documents it creates and opens automatically to solve the tasks. The data is sent to our privately hosted instance of the TaskTracker server. TaskTracker only sends the data when you click the Submit button. All data is sent anonymously, and only includes filenames, source code, and changes. Also you will need to fill the survey about your age, gender, programming experience, and country you are from.

In addition to TaskTracker, Activity Tracker plugin is installed to track actions in the IDE, which are also sent to our privately hosted server. Activity Tracker registers and stores locally descriptions of actions, usernames, project names, and paths to files that were active during each action.

When sent to the TaskTracker server, Activity Tracker actions are filtered and include only those that were made when working with task files (automatically created by the TaskTracker plugin); all paths, the username, and project name are removed.

This data will be additionally anonymized to form an open dataset with the solutions:

• all comments will be removed from source code;
• all names of variables, types, functions, classes, and other entities will be anonymized.

However, if you install a TaskTracker plugin distribution provided by other researchers, all your problem-solving data is sent to such researchers. We do not have access to their TaskTracker server instance. In this case, your code changes can be sent to us only voluntarily by the researchers themselves. Additional data anonymization (see above) is at the discretion of the senders. For our part, we anonymize all data without fail when publishing a dataset.