working draft - jume 2010

A “Nutrition Label” for Privacy Policies

Through an iterative design process, including focus groups and a laboratory study, we developed a standardized, tabular, "nutrition label" for online privacy policies. We tested this standardized format, two variants, and two real-world policy formats in a large, online user study to show how consumer understanding and decision-making can be assisted by intentional interface design.

Research Questions

  1. Can we design a better privacy policy? Where we define better as measured by:
    • accuracy
    • speed
    • opinion
  2. Can this design make policy comparison more accessible?
  3. Can deeper, more specific information be made accessible through interactivity?
  4. Do icons assist users with the understanding of certain concepts?

Interactivity In The Label

A follow on study will involve literally diving deeper into information in the standard privacy label. As many of the data categories and purposes are grouped in the label, but spelled out separately in some natural language policies. To address this we will test an interactive version of the label that explains sub-cell level information.

We will ask a series of questions as in the previous work, with simple and complex questions, but add simple and complex variants where partial cell information is required (e.g. a question will ask about the collection of a user's phone number, the contact information box will be marked as collected, but upon further investigation only home address, not phone number will be collected).

This study will be run on Amazon's Mechanical Turk: same procedure as before, between subjects design. Likely conditions:

Questions to answer:

In the design phase, when building the three versions (hover, expand, sidebar) a laboratory study of 25ish users will be conducted, within-subjects, using an eye-tracker. This will allow us to better understand:

The Iconography of Privacy

Over the past decade a number of iconographic symbols have been proposed as replacement or supplements to help users better understand privacy. We question whether any of these icons possess comprehension benefits to users, and seek to understand how they can best be applied. These sets include:

Ideas

Calendar

June 13th
Reading more papers, surveys, guidelines, TRUSTe reports, and privacy policies (summary coming next week). Also CFP happened.
June 20th
First mock prototypes. Initial draft of summary privacy interests report up.
June 27th
PriMo workshop.
July 4th
Return from europe. Prep study design.
July 11th
Initial around lab testing.
July 18th
Begin piloting. Prepare and make large-scale modifications
July 25th
Run study all week.
August 1st
Run study all week.
August 8th
Begin study write up. Begin MTurk prep.
August 15th
August 22nd
Launch MTurk variant
August 29th
September 5th
September 12th
September 19th
CHI deadline: September 23
September 26th
Switch gears to ICON study
October 3rd
October 10th
October 17th
October 24th
Launch ICON study
October 31st
November 7th
November 14th
November 21st
November 28th
December 5th
December 12th
December 19th
December 26th
Have all INTERACTIVE and ICON work complete.

Supplemental Documents

coming soon

Tasks

INTERACTIVE tasks: (all this summer)

ICON tasks:

MISCELLANEOUS tasks: