With EU-GDPR and related regulations, the respon-sibility to make privacy-related decisions such as to provide informed consent to data handling practices mainly rests with the user. However, current lengthy privacy policies and often deceptive cookie notices rarely facilitate truly informed consent. Related work on privacy icons or structuring privacy policies aims to enhance users' understanding but achieve mixed results. In a between-subjects study with N=379 participants we thus explored the potential of embedding privacy information in visual metaphors and analogies to support informed decision-making. Additionally, we explored whether dynamic feedback helped users understand the implications of their decisions. While both visual and textual information and feedback appeared to support users' understanding of data handling practices and alignment with personal preferences, with no significant differences between conditions, users per-ceived visualizations as more suitable and aesthetically pleasing than text. This indicates potential for using visual contexts to enhance informed consent not only within existing cookie notices but also in emerging tools such as privacy assistants or related privacy-enhancing technologies. Future work should investigate differences to currently deployed solutions and the effect of perceived pleasantness of design variants on users' understanding and decisions.

Many EU data collectors rely on informed consent for data processing, requiring users to consent after being informed. To do so, it is necessary for users to have at least partially correct assumptions about what the software does. The introduction of the official German contact tracing app, the Corona-Warn-App (CWA), provides an interesting use case to explore whether potential users are capable of being informed with a reasonable amount of effort by the publishers of software. We captured CWA users’ and non-users’ mental models of data collection and processing in the app in interviews (N = 20) and a survey study (N = 352). We investigated whether users have enough correct assumptions to be considered informed. Our findings show that the participants had misconceptions. Therefore, we argue that user consent might often lack the required level of informedness and may be replaced by a more rigorous privacy-by-design principle.

Personalized privacy assistants (PPAs) communicate privacy-related decisions of their users to Internet of Things (IoT) devices. There are different ways to implement PPAs by varying the degree of autonomy or decision model. This paper investigates user perceptions of PPA autonomy models and privacy profiles – archetypes of individual privacy needs – as a basis for PPA decisions in private environments (e.g., a friend’s home). We first explore how privacy profiles can be assigned to users and propose an assignment method. Next, we investigate user perceptions in 18 usage scenarios with varying contexts, data types and number of decisions in a study with 1126 participants. We found considerable differences between the profiles in settings with few decisions. If the number of decisions gets high (> 1/h), participants exclusively preferred fully autonomous PPAs. Finally, we discuss implications and recommendations for designing scalable PPAs that serve as privacy interfaces for future IoT devices.

Legal frameworks rely on users to make an informed decision about data collection, e.g., by accepting or declining the use of tracking technologies. In practice, however, users hardly interact with tracking consent notices on a deliberate website per website level, but usually accept or decline optional tracking technologies altogether in a habituated behavior. We explored the potential of three different nudge types (color highlighting, social cue, timer) and default settings to interrupt this auto-response in an experimental between-subject design with 167 participants. We did not find statistically significant differences regarding the buttons clicked. Our results showed that opt-in default settings significantly decrease tracking technology use acceptance rates. These results are a first step towards understanding the effects of different nudging concepts on users’ interaction with tracking consent notices.

Many websites contain services from third parties. Misconfigurations of these services can lead to missing compliance with legal obligations and privacy risks for website users. Previous research indicates that one cause for such privacy issues is missing awareness. However, reasons for the missing awareness and other reasons for the prevalence of privacy issues are not widely researched; that includes website owners’ dealing with those issues. To shed light on the issue, we analyze 1043 responses from website owners to a notification about a privacy issue on their website using thematic analysis, following an exploratory and qualitative approach. Our analysis shows that, next to unawareness of the issue, incorrect technical implementation and ambiguous responsibilities are among the reasons for privacy issues. Also, website owners face different challenges, such as a lack of knowledge or slow organizational coordination and processes. In addition, our results show that the circumstances in which they operate their website influences how they act and what challenges they face. To illustrate these differences in website owners, we derive three personas from our thematic analysis: (1) the Ignorant Hobbyist, (2) the Busy Self-Employed, and (3) the Informed Multi-Stakeholder. These personas cover the majority of the aspects of the analyzed responses and represent the diversity of website owners and their backgrounds. Given the challenges and backgrounds of website owners, we discuss which prerequisites must be fulfilled to remediate privacy issues on websites. Finally, we present measures that support website owners in remediating privacy issues and show how to adapt these measures to the needs of different website owners. We hope that better support for website owners will also lead to better privacy for website visitors.

Personal Privacy Assistants (PPAs) can support users in managing their privacy. Conducting a user study, we provide qualitative and quantitative insights into how users imagine their PPA and how PPAs designs can appear for different user groups. We highlight five aspects derived from the literature that are essential when designing a PPA: What features should the PPA have? How should the PPA learn the users’ preferences? What level of user involvement in its decisions should the PPAs have? Which vendor should offer the PPA? What data are users willing to disclose to their PPA? Our results provide a holistic view of user perceptions of PPAs. We identify two user groups that differ in their characteristics, such as technology affinity and privacy concerns, and have different ideas of a PPA in terms of automation level and provider, for example. We discuss our results in relation to the literature and derive recommendations for designing PPAs to fulfill user needs.