Understandable privacy information builds trust with users and therefore provides an important competitive advantage for the provider. However, designing privacy information that is both truthful and easy for users to understand is challenging. There are many complex balancing decisions to be made, not only with respect to legal but also visual and user experience design issues. This is why designing understandable privacy information requires combining at least three disciplines that have had little to do with each other in current practice: law, visual design, and user experience design research. The challenges of combining all three disciplines actually culminate in the design and use of Privacy Icons, which are expected to make lengthy legal texts clear and easy to understand (see Art. 12 sect. 7 of the EU General Data Protection Regulation). However, that is much easier said than done. In this paper, we summarise our key learnings from a five years research process on how to design Privacy Icons as a component of effective transparency and user controls. We will provide examples of information and control architectures for privacy policies, forms of consent (especially in the form of cookie banners), privacy dashboards and consent agents in which Privacy Icons may be embedded, 2) a non-exhaustive set of more than 150 Privacy Icons, and above all 3) a concept and process model that can be used to implement the requirements of the GDPR in terms of transparency and user controls in an effective way, according to the data protection by design approach in Art. 25 sect. 1 GDPR. The paper will show that it is a rocky road to the stars and we still haven't arrived – but at least we know how to go.

In a data-driven society, the collection and processing of data is essential to the operation of existing technologies and the development of new ones. Data protection law protects individuals against risks associated with the processing of “personal data”. However, despite an intensive legal debate, there is still considerable uncertainty as to when data is personal data and when it is not. The reason for this is that data such as technical data or geo-location data usually is not “personal” per se but only when it is used for a specific purpose and in a specific way, or to be more precise, when the data processing causes a specific risk to a fundamental right of an individual. In our paper, we demonstrate that by focusing on these risks when assessing the scope of application, the question whether data falls into the scope of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or not becomes much clearer. The about, purpose, and result elements, introduced by the Art. 29 Working Party, thereby turn out to be a powerful set of analytical tools to determine which rights are specifically affected by data processing and, thus, to what extent a data subject is identified or identifiable in the processing context. While the about element addresses different risks to the right to privacy, the purpose element specifically reveals risks to the autonomy status of an individual. Finally, the result element focuses on the negative effect data processing can have on any other fundamental rights of the individual. On this basis, it is also possible to define more precisely the legal requirements for anonymising personal data. First of all, we illustrate that anonymisation mainly affects the about element and can do little “against” the purpose and result element. At least, however, by assessing which sphere of privacy is specifically concerned, it is possible to more precisely define when an individual is identified in a dataset and, thus, what the requirements for anonymization are.

While the recent discussion on Art. 25 GDPR often considers the approach of data protection by design as an innovative idea, the notion of making data protection law more effective through requiring the data controller to implement the legal norms into the processing design is almost as old as the data protection debate. However, there is another, more recent shift in establishing the data protection by design approach through law, which is not yet understood to its fullest extent in the debate. Art. 25 GDPR requires the controller to not only implement the legal norms into the processing design but to do so in an effective manner. By explicitly declaring the effectiveness of the protection measures to be the legally required result, the legislator inevitably raises the question of which methods can be used to test and assure such efficacy. In our opinion, extending the legal compatibility assessment to the real effects of the required measures opens this approach to interdisciplinary methodologies. In this paper, we first summarise the current state of research on the methodology established in Art. 25 sect. 1 GDPR, and pinpoint some of the challenges of incorporating interdisciplinary research methodologies. On this premise, we present an empirical research methodology and first findings which offer one approach to answering the question on how to specify processing purposes effectively. Lastly, we discuss the implications of these findings for the legal interpretation of Art. 25 GDPR and related provisions, especially with respect to a more effective implementation of transparency and consent, and provide an outlook on possible next research steps.

Emerging technologies---such as the voice enabled internet---present many opportunities and challenges for HCI research and society as a whole. Advocating for better, healthier implementations of these technologies will require us to communicate abstract values, such as trust, to an audience that ranges from the general public to technologists and even policymakers. In this paper, we show how a combination of film-making and product design can help to illustrate these abstract values. Working as part of a wider international advocacy campaign, Our Friends Electric focuses on the voice enabled internet, translating abstract notions of Internet Health into comprehensible digital futures for the relationship between our voice and the internet. We conclude with a call for designers of physical things to be more involved with the development of trust, privacy and security in this powerful emerging technological landscape.