Privacy Icons

Privacy Icons

The Problem

We begin with one major problem about privacy policies (and privacy communications in general): the language in this space is so complicated that users can't understand it. As a result they've generally stopped caring, and when they do take time to think about privacy, they feel duped. Sites make it too complicated to understand, and besides, users have little choice: sometimes there's only one game in town, so to speak, and the price of admission is personal data. And so users don't bother trying to understand or differentiate among the privacy practices of most online sites and services. Businesses, in turn, have trouble conveying to users that they do care about privacy, and this affects their ability to differentiate themselves from competitors based on privacy.

We began our problem-solving process, then, with two points of view. The first is the consumer who, to some degree, "wants" to make better choices about privacy but has become inured to the current landscape and, moreover, has little time to research and process things. The second point of view is that of the business that—however rare this is—wants to do better at communicating its privacy practices.

The Idea

We're aiming for the golden vector where consumer needs, defined both by consumers' demonstrated frustration with the length and density of privacy policies and by the importance of being able to make quick judgments about whether to consent to a privacy practice, meet businesses' desire to make their privacy practices clearer.

To that end we want to give consumers and businesses alike a simple, clear, easy-to-use tool for conveying and processing privacy practices. But we don't mean just to translate websites' privacy policies into simpler icons, or to provide a granular, machine-readable language for mapping privacy practices. We think the solution has to be as simple as it can be. That way users don't get frustrated with learning curves and legalese, and businesses feel comfortable adopting a product that doesn't demand legal nitpicking and constant reconfiguration.

To this end we're trying to develop a baseline statement about privacy practices—possibly even two or three statements, pending some user testing—that consumers find helpful in making the threshold decision of whether to use a site or service, and businesses likewise find useful for communicating that same baseline principle. We think we can use such a statement or set of basic statements to develop a tool that uses icons, integrated into a browser or mobile device, to inform users on the most basic level about whether a site or service they're using comports with this baseline privacy practice. Eventually businesses might find it useful, on their ends, either to use this simple system as a way to advertise their privacy policies, or even to adopt a "Privacy Pledge" that could integrate with the consumer-facing tool.