What About My Privacy?Helping Users Understand Online Privacy Policies

Privacy explanations – A means to end-user trust

“…So far, privacy policies are the primary channel to inform users about data practices of a service provider. However, privacy policies are insufficient when it comes to informing users since they are too long, too vague, and the information required can often only be interpreted with legal background knowledge [19,20,21,22,23]. Up to this moment, there is a lack of a user-centered solution to explain privacy-related aspects in an appropriate and understandable way.…”

“…We communicate using e-mail, messengers, and social media; seek for answers to private and sensitive questions using search engines. As a result, we leave a substantial quantity of digital evidence about our routines, opinions, and attitudes behind, making our privacy heavily dependent on how these systems are designed [19,50].…”

“…Concerning one's privacy in software, long privacy policies or short privacy notices are often the only available sources of information to end users where they can (possibly) find out what happens to their data. End users rarely read or understand privacy policies [19,20,22]. As a result, users rarely benefit from privacy policies in terms of learning about their privacy.…”

“…There is a large body of research that showsas does our data -that privacy policies are not an appropriate medium for informing end-users about their privacy [19,21,23]. Rather, they are made "by lawyers for lawyers".…”

“…The calculated risk scores for the risk beliefs metric ranged from 1.95 to 7.0 (M=4.78, SD=1. 19). The histogram depicted in Figure 8 shows an approximately normal distribution for the risk scores.…”