The design of a privacy dashboard for an academic environment based on participatory design

Abstract

In today's world, characterized by the massive generation of data, a major problem related to data manipulation occurs when people's privacy is violated. To face this situation different regulations and solutions, to help users get in control over their data, emerged. However, many of the solutions require a certain level of knowledge in the field of privacy or offer unclear information that does not facilitate a real control of their data by the users. Added to this is the unfriendly user interface design as one of the factors that prevents users from managing their privacy settings effectively. Thus, in this work we explore the effect of the application of Participatory Design (PD) techniques in the implementation of privacy enhancing technologies. In particular, we focus on the use of PD for the design of a privacy dashboard that encourages the immersion of users with privacy issues and gives them greater control with a user interface according to usability criteria. The evaluation of the PD process, which has resulted in a high-fidelity prototype of the dashboard, shows encouraging results and greater user immersion in privacy management.