Visualizing the provenance of personal data using comics

Abstract

Personal health data is acquired, processed, stored, and accessed using a variety of different devices, applications, and services. These are often complex and highly connected. Therefore, use or misuse of the data is hard to detect for people, if they are not capable to understand the trace (i.e., the provenance) of that data. We present a visualization technique for personal health data provenance using comic strips. Each strip of the comic represents a certain activity, such as entering data using a smartphone application, storing or retrieving data on a cloud service, or generating a diagram from the data. The comic strips are generated automatically using recorded provenance graphs. The easy-to-understand comics enable all people to notice crucial points regarding their data such as, for example, privacy violations.