Revisiting the Design Agenda for Privacy Notices and Security Warnings

TL;DR

This paper reviews design principles for privacy notices and security warnings, highlighting challenges like user habituation and proposing new research directions to improve user engagement and decision-making.

Contribution

It provides a summarized review of existing and emerging design principles and identifies three new research directions for privacy-enhancing dialogs.

Findings

User fatigue and habituation reduce notice effectiveness

Design principles can mitigate risk-prone behavior

Three emergent research directions are proposed

Abstract

System-generated user-facing notices, dialogs, and warnings in privacy and security interventions present the opportunity to support users in making informed decisions about identified risks. However, too often, they are bypassed, ignored, and mindlessly clicked through, mainly in connection to the well-studied effect of user fatigue and habituation. The contribution of this position paper is to provide a summarized review of established and emergent design dimensions and principles to limit such risk-prone behavior, and to identify three emergent research and design directions for privacy-enhancing dialogs.