Data Minimisation Potential for Timestamps in Git: An Empirical Analysis of User Configurations

Abstract

With the increasing digitisation, more and more of our activities leave digital traces. This is especially true for our work life. Data protection regulations demand the consideration of employees’ right to privacy and that the recorded data is necessary and proportionate for the intended purpose. Prior work indicates that standard software commonly used in workplace environments records user activities in excessive detail. A major part of this are timestamps, whose temporal contextualisation facilitates monitoring. Applying data minimisation on timestamps is however dependent on an understanding of their necessity. We provide large-scale real-world evidence of user demand for timestamp precision. We analysed over 20 000 Git configuration files published on GitHub with regard to date-related customisation in output and filtering, and found that a large proportion of users choose customisations with lower or adaptive precision: almost 90% of chosen output formats for subcommand aliases use reduced or adaptive precision and about 75% of date filters use day precision or less. We believe that this is evidence for the viability of timestamp minimisation. We evaluate possible privacy gains and functionality losses and present a tool to reduce Git dates.