Towards displaying privacy information with icons

Abstract

European data protection regulation obliges every service provider to show a privacy policy on his web site. Many privacy policies are too long, too complicated to understand, and reading them is hardly appealing. To enhance the user's awareness on who is collecting and handling their personal data for what purpose and to depict core information of the policy, privacy icons could be used in addition to written policies. Further, specific privacy icons could be helpful for expressing possible, planned or performed data processing between individuals, e.g., in social networks. © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.