Privacy languages: are we there yet to enable user controls?

Privacy protection is one of the most prominent concerns for web users. Despite numerous efforts, users remain powerless in controlling how their personal information should be used and by whom, and find limited options to actually opt-out of dominating service providers, who often process users inf...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhao, J, Binns, R, Van Kleek, M, Shadbolt, N
Other Authors: Bourdeau, J
Format: Conference item
Published: Association for Computing Machinery 2016
Description
Summary:Privacy protection is one of the most prominent concerns for web users. Despite numerous efforts, users remain powerless in controlling how their personal information should be used and by whom, and find limited options to actually opt-out of dominating service providers, who often process users information with limited transparency or respect for their privacy preferences. Privacy languages are designed to express the privacy-related preferences of users and the practices of organisations, in order to establish a privacy-preserved data handling protocol. However, in practice there has been limited adoption of these languages, by either users or data controllers. This survey paper attempts to understand the strengths and limitations of existing policy languages, focusing on their capacity of enabling users to express their privacy preferences. Our preliminary results show a lack of focus on normal web users, in both language design and their tooling design. This systematic survey lays the ground work for future privacy protection designs that aim to be centred around web users for empowering their control of data privacy.