  Context: Data protection regulations such as the GDPR and the CCPA affect how
software may handle the personal data of its users and how consent for handling
of such data may be given. Prior literature focused on how this works in
operation, but lacks a perspective of the impact on the software development
process.
  Objective: Within our work, we will address this gap and explore how software
development itself is impacted. We want to understand which data
protection-related issues are reported, who reports them, and how developers
react to such issues.
  Method: We will conduct an exploratory study based on issues that are
reported with respect to data protection in open source software on GitHub. We
will determine the roles of the actors involved, the status of such issues, and
we use inductive coding to understand the data protection issues. We
qualitatively analyze the issues as part of the inductive coding and further
explore the reasoning for resolutions. We quantitatively analyze the relation
between the roles, resolutions, and data protection issues to understand
correlations.
