Transparency through Contextual Privacy Statements

Abstract

Privacy policies are the state of the practice technique to achieve data transparency. However, they have a variety of issues in practice: They are presented in a non-prominent way, are typically quite lengthy, and not written in the users’ language. Additionally, they are quite abstract, as privacy policies are generic documents that do not relate to the current activity of the user but give a high level overview on the overall system. In this paper, we present our idea of "contextual privacy statements" that overcome the shortcomings of state of the practice privacy policies. Instead of having one generic privacy policy that has to fit every use case and every user group, contextual privacy statements provide concrete information about privacy and data protection in a specific use case or activity. We aim for better understandability of privacy policies, resulting in an increased transparency and user acceptance.