New Differential Privacy Communication Pipeline and Design Framework

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new communication pipeline and design framework for explaining differential privacy to users, aiming to increase their willingness to share data by improving understanding and trust.

Contribution

It proposes a systematic design framework for communicating differential privacy, including 17 designs and evaluation methods to enhance user trust and comprehension.

Findings

Text-based descriptions are most clear across scenarios.

Step-by-step storyboards can effectively persuade users to trust DP.

User study indicates potential for improved user trust with interactive designs.

Abstract

Organizations started to adopt differential privacy (DP) techniques hoping to persuade more users to share personal data with them. However, many users do not understand DP techniques, thus may not be willing to share. Previous research suggested that the design of DP mechanism communication could influence users' willingness to share data. Based on the prior work, we propose a new communication pipeline that starts by asking users about their privacy concerns and then provides a customized DP mechanism and communication. We also propose a design framework that systemically explores effective communication designs ranging from a text-based high-level description to a step-by-step interactive storyboard. Based on the framework, we created 17 designs and recruited five people to evaluate. Our user study showed that text-based descriptions have the highest clarity in all scenarios, while the step-by-step interactive storyboards have the potential to persuade users to trust central DP. Our future work will optimize the design and conduct a large-scale efficacy study.