Extended Version of Paper Presented at ICISSP, Porto 20-22 February, 2025 A Value-Driven Approach to the Online Consent Conundrum -- A Study with the Unemployed

TL;DR

This paper investigates how to make online consent forms more effective by understanding the values of users, especially the unemployed, through interviews and surveys, aiming to reduce form length and improve informed consent.

Contribution

It introduces a value-driven framework for designing shorter, more meaningful consent forms based on empirical studies with unemployed and employed users.

Findings

Unemployed and employed users prioritize similar values.

Effort minimization is the most valued aspect.

No significant difference in value prioritization between unemployed and employed.

Abstract

Online services are required to gain informed consent from users to collect, store and analyse their personal data, both intentionally divulged and derived during their use of the service. There are many issues with these forms: they are too long, too complex and demand the user's attention too frequently. Many users consent without reading so do not know what they are agreeing to. As such,granted consent is effectively uninformed. In this paper, we report on two studies we carried out to arrive at a value-driven approach to inform efforts to reduce the length of consent forms. The first study interviewed unemployed users to identify the values they want these forms to satisfy. The second survey study helped us to quantify the values and value creators. To ensure that we understood the particular valuation of the unemployed, we compared their responses to those of an employed demographic and observed no significant differences between their prioritisation on any of the values. However, we did find substantial differences between values and value creators, with effort minimisation being most valued by our participants.