Poli-see: An Interactive Tool for Visualizing Privacy Policies

Abstract

Prior work has shown that current privacy policies fail to effectively implement informed consent. This work investigates how data use practices might be conveyed by a graphical representation. We present Poli-see, an interactive tool for visualizing privacy policies. We then describe the results of an in-person user study (n = 24) and an online study (n = 600) that evaluate how well Poli-see conveys information about data use practices. In our in-person study, we found that participants answered factual questions about privacy policies more accurately when shown a Poli-see representation than when shown an annotated text representation. In our online study, we found that participants who were shown a Poli-see representation reported higher levels of enjoyment and higher likelihood of looking at the policy than participants who were shown a conventional text representation or an annotated text representation. These results suggest that graphical representations might be useful for conveying data use practices to users, but that further research and refinement will be required before graphical representations can be effectively deployed in real-world systems. We conclude by identifying key advantages and challenges for graphical representations of privacy policies drawn from our experience.