A Design Space for Effective Privacy Notices*

Abstract

Notifying users about a system's data practices is supposed to enable users to make informed privacy decisions. Yet, current notice and choice mechanisms, such as privacy policies, are often ineffective because they are neither usable nor useful, and are therefore ignored by users. Constrained interfaces on mobile devices, wearables, and smart home devices connected in an Internet of Things exacerbate the issue. Much research has studied usability issues of privacy notices and many proposals for more usable privacy notices exist. Yet, there is little guidance for designers and developers on the design aspects that can impact the effectiveness of privacy notices. In this paper, we make multiple contributions to remedy this issue. We survey the existing literature on privacy notices and identify challenges, requirements, and best practices for privacy notice design. Further, we map out the design space for privacy notices by identifying relevant dimensions. This provides a taxonomy and consistent terminology of notice approaches to foster understanding and reasoning about notice options available in the context of specific systems. Our systemization of knowledge and the developed design space can help designers, developers, and researchers identify notice and choice requirements and develop a comprehensive notice concept for their system that addresses the needs of different audiences and considers the system's limitations and opportunities for providing notice.

The Creation and Analysis of a Website Privacy Policy Corpus

“…Text summarization is a possibility, using the annotations as a guide for important details to retain. Internet users have already demonstrated limited patience with text-based privacy policies, which adds a nuance to this challenge and suggests the need for a combination of text and pictorial representations (or chiefly pictorial representations) to communicate data practices (Schaub et al, 2015).…”

Explicating the Challenges of Providing Novel Media Experiences Driven by User Personal Data

“…While research has highlighted the importance of allowing data legibility, negotiability and agency through control [32] to the users, there still remains an explicit call for the technological embodiment of these principles. Users are continued to be presented with incomprehensible privacy statements [31,37], followed by acceptance statements where the users are constrained to binary choices [45] dictated by service providers often leading to low levels of understanding and very little space to exercise control [43].…”

“…Terms and conditions statements are a classic example of transparency provision where despite active research in both industry [52] and academia [21,43], the adoption of alternative forms of privacy statements that empower the user, still remain a challenge. Thus, designing data interactions that lead to increased awareness and understanding of the underlying data practises are prioritised as a means for building user trust.…”

Industry Ideals Barriers in Using Alternative Privacy Policies

“…In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission has been regulating the same since the Fair Credit Reporting Act of the 1970s (Federal Trade Commission n.d.). Polices are often expected to serve multiple and contradictory roles (Schaub et al 2015). Whilst policies may be meeting legal requirements, they are not successful in fulfilling obligations to endusers (McDonald & Cranor 2008;Cranor 2012;Schaub et al 2015) as the lengthy legal jargon is often inaccessible to the non-specialist.…”

“…Alternative layouts like the multilayered approach (Pinnick n.d.), nutrition label approach (Kelley et al 2009), P3P policy presentation tool based on the Expandable Grid (Reeder et al 2008), Audience View (Lipford et al 2010), Privacy Bird (Cranor et al 2006) etc have been proposed before. Even with this wide and emerging set of solutions at hand, there is still a call for further research (Schaub et al 2015) in this area as the majority of the most accessed privacy policies still follow the traditional, text-intensive format.…”