Visualizing Exports of Personal Data by Exercising the Right of Data Portability in the Data Track - Are People Ready for This?

Abstract

A transparency enhancing tool called Data Track has been developed at Karlstad University. The latest stand-alone version of the tool allows users to visualize their data exports. For analyzing the users' perceptions of the Data Track in regard to transparency features and the concepts of data export and data portability, we have conducted a qualitative user study. We observed that although users had rather little interest in the visualization of derived data activities revealed in the Google location file, they were interested in other kinds of derived data like usage patterns for different service providers. Also, as earlier user studies revealed, we again confirmed that it is confusing for users to differentiate between locally and remotely stored and controlled data. Finally, in spite of being concerned about the security of the data exported to their machines, for exercising data portability rights pursuant to the General Data Protection Regulation, most participants would prefer to first export and edit the data before uploading it to another service provider and would appreciate using a tool such as the Data Track for helping them in this context.

A Visualization Interface to Improve the Transparency of Collected Personal Data on the Internet

“…The age ranged between 20 and 64 years with a predominance on the age group of 20-34 years (30/37). Most participants were either students (12) or employees (24). All participants were from Germany.…”

“…Visualization of data flows Related approaches that also aim to visualize personal collections of data with the goal of increasing the privacy awareness are DataTrack from Fischer-Hbner et al [1,15,16,24], PrivacyInsight from Bier et al [5], Privacy Dashboard from Raschke et al [39] and the online interactive tool developed by Kani-Zabihi and Helmhout [23]. These approaches are designed to be implemented on the server side and while they are also designed for personal data, the main focus seems to be on showing the data flows, who the data is shared with, and the details of the provided information.…”

TILT: A GDPR-Aligned Transparency Information Language and Toolkit for Practical Privacy Engineering

“…Such TETs exist in a broad variety of forms addressing transparency from many different angles. In particular, TETs comprise such diverse technologies as generating a location history based on social media entries [19], visualizing data exports [21], phone sensor permission management [41], or in-browser cookie tracking [31]. For categorizing these TETs, different taxonomies exist [13,18].…”

“…The schema also contains a complete document covering most of the possible paths of the syntax tree. Some properties, such as $schema, $id, title etc., are (defacto 21 ) mandatory JSON Schema meta properties which are used to describe the document for validators. Afterwards, the language definition according to the formal definition is carried out.…”

From Design Requirements to Effective Privacy Notifications: Empowering Users of Online Services to Make Informed Decisions

“…Transparency-Enhancing Tools (TETs) are technological artifacts that facilitate transparency, and can therefore help improve a data subject's privacy. TETs that depend on the proactive engagement of users have e. g. explored the visualization of disclosed personal data (Karegar et al, 2016;Kolter et al, 2010). Conversely, TETs that rely on delivering notifications to facilitate awareness are often employed in the context of location-based services (see e. g. Hsieh et al 2007;Sadeh et al 2009).…”