End User Comprehension of Privacy Policy Representations

Providers of mobile applications (apps) offer free apps and services but monetise user information and attention, whilst app users have limited control and inadequate understanding over the manner in which apps use their personal data. This study is a first step to taking a user centred approach in the design of app privacy policies to ensure they are easy to understand by non-technical users. To this end we capture the views of 41 users on four different privacy policy representations and analyse them to extract user priorities and needs. We have found that one of the alternative policy representations is liked best by users, and that users focused on data collection and use, neglecting other privacy aspects such as data monetisation and legal issues. As a result of our analysis, we propose a novel interactive representation to enhance the informativeness of privacy policies, especially with respect to data monetisation, whilst facilitating greater user control over personal data privacy. We evaluate our proposal using the cognitive dimensions framework.