Privacy Explanations - A Means to End-User Trust

TL;DR

This paper explores how privacy explanations can enhance end-user trust and awareness by clarifying data collection purposes, showing high user interest and potential for privacy-aware system development.

Contribution

It introduces privacy explanations as a means to improve transparency and trust, supported by survey evidence of user interest and potential impact on privacy awareness.

Findings

91.6% of users are interested in privacy explanations

Privacy explanations can increase trust in software systems

They help users become more privacy-aware

Abstract

Software systems are ubiquitous, and their use is ingrained in our everyday lives. They enable us to get in touch with people quickly and easily, support us in gathering information, and help us perform our daily tasks. In return, we provide these systems with a large amount of personal information, often unaware that this is jeopardizing our privacy. End users are typically unaware of what data is collected, for what purpose, who has access to it, and where and how it is stored. To address this issue, we looked into how explainability might help to tackle this problem. We created privacy explanations that aim to help to clarify to end users why and for what purposes specific data is required. We asked end users about privacy explanations in a survey and found that the majority of respondents (91.6 \%) are generally interested in receiving privacy explanations. Our findings reveal that privacy explanations can be an important step towards increasing trust in software systems and can increase the privacy awareness of end users. These findings are a significant step in developing privacy-aware systems and incorporating usable privacy features into them, assisting users in protecting their privacy.