A user study of the expandable grid applied to P3P privacy policy visualization

Displaying website privacy policies to consumers in ways they understand is an important part of gaining consumers’ trust and informed consent, yet most website privacy policies today are presented in confusing, legalistic natural language. Moreover, because website privacy policy presentations vary from website to website, policies are difficult to compare and it is difficult for consumers to determine which websites offer the best privacy protections. The Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) addresses part of the problem with natural language policies by providing a formal, machine-readable language for expressing privacy policies in a manner that is standardized across websites. To address remaining problems, an automated tool must be developed to read P3P policies and display them to users in a comprehensible way. To this end, we have developed a P3P policy presentation tool based on the Expandable Grid, a visualization technique for displaying policies in an interactive matr...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SOUPS
• Authors: Robert W. Reeder, Patrick Gage Kelley, Aleecia M. McDonald, Lorrie Faith Cranor
• Keywords: Security Privacy, SOUPS 2009