  Failure data collected from the field (e.g., failure traces, bug reports, and
memory dumps) represent an invaluable source of information for developers who
need to reproduce and analyze failures. Unfortunately, field data may include
sensitive information and thus cannot be collected indiscriminately.
Privacy-preserving techniques can address this problem anonymizing data and
reducing the risk of disclosing personal information. However, collecting
anonymized information may harm reproducibility, that is, the anonymized data
may not allow the reproduction of a failure observed in the field. In this
paper, we present an empirical investigation about the impact of
privacy-preserving techniques on the reproducibility of failures. In
particular, we study how five privacy-preserving techniques may impact
reproducibilty for 19 bugs in 17 Android applications. Results provide insights
on how to select and configure privacy-preserving techniques.
