Bolder is beter: Raising user awareness through salient and concise privacy notices

Abstract

This paper addresses the question whether the recently proposed approach of concise privacy notices in apps and on websites is efective in raising user awareness. To assess the efectiveness in a realistic setting, we included concise notices in a fctitious but realistic ftness tracking app and asked participants recruited from an online panel to provide their feedback on the usability of the app as a cover story. Importantly, after giving feedback, users were also asked to recall the data practices described in the notices. The experimental setup included the variation of diferent levels of saliency and riskiness of the privacy notices. Based on a total sample of 2,274 participants, our fndings indicate that concise privacy notices are indeed a promising approach to raise user awareness for privacy information when displayed in a salient way, especially in case the notices describe risky data practices. Our results may be helpful for regulators, user advocates and transparency-oriented companies in creating or enforcing better privacy transparency towards average users that do not read traditional privacy policies.