In this Jam we brought together designers and legal researchers interested in privacy to reimagine together how privacy policies can be redesigned to be more user-friendly, transparent – and to be actually read by internet users!
In our Jam, we took Twitter’s privacy policy as a candidate for redesign. This is because Twitter is a widely used service, its privacy policy looks pretty and mostly used via mobile. People rarely read privacy policies and terms of use on their browsers, and we suspected that it is even more unlikely that they would read them on the small screens of their mobiles. This channel is not optimal at all for long texts, so we really need to redesign what a privacy policy could be and look like in this environment. This is not about improving a layout or adding embellishments, but to really rethink an information product to work effectively on a different platform.
The Jam was organized within the framework of the EMSOC Project and Visual Law Lab pilot, carried out at KU Leuven’s ICRI (Interdisciplinary Centre for Law and ICT).
Participants
Our privacy Jammers and prototype creators were Isacco Chiaf, Laura Beck, Flore De Crombrugghe, Cedric Zwaenepoel, Johan Van Looveren, Pieter-Jan Ombelet, Natalie Bertels, Laurens Naudts, Amandine Leonard, Lina Jasmontaite, Jussi Vaihia, Henning Böttcher, and Mathias Vermeulen. Stefania Passera, tryly yours, as always was the main facilitator and Valerie Verdoot, Tom Vercruysse and Pagona Tsormpatzoudi gave a big helping hand.
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Scope of the Jam
In a nutshell, the brief was to create user-friendly and mobile-friendly formats of the Twitter privacy policy.
The main goal was increasing user awareness and engagement with legal information in an easy way.
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Team 1
The solution of team 1 tries to intercept user’s attention at sign-up. Rather than burying the privacy policy information somewhere in the site, the user is presented with the information in a summarized way, organized under meaningful titles. Of course, the user can still skip all this information, but the titles and the layout make it harder to completely ignore them.
Team 2
Team 2’s concept also attempted to capture users’ attention at sign up, but also created a system to easily keep track of one’s choices.
The concept is called “It’s UP to you” because during sign up the user is asked to opt-in or opt-out from certain things: swiping up means “I accept” and swiping down means “I do not accept”. Each opt-in (e.g. cookies, discoverability, behavioral advertising etc) has an identifiable icon, and users can easily review and change their privacy choices later on from their account page.
Click on the picture below to see the PDF prototype:
Team 3
The solution of team 3 focuses in particular on how to create an easy dashboard to manage one’s privacy choices and how to notify changes to the privacy policy.
The concept relies on the overview+detail principle, so the user has access to clear headings to get oriented on the topic, and then can expand each topic to learn more. The privacy provisions are divided into “data you give” (things the user decides to publish or to opt-in) and “data we take” (extracted by Twitter) in order to show more clearly the difference between the two types of collected data.
The numbers appearing next to the icons indicate how many types of data are used for a certain purpose e.g. in this fictional example 5 different types of data are used for service improvement.
Click on the picture below to see the PDF prototype:
All prototypes are Licensed under the CreativeCommons CC BY-SA 4.0 License