A Visualization Approach for Adaptive Consent in the European Data Protection Framework

For the first time in the history of European data protection law, the use of visualizations and especially of icons is explicitly suggested as a way to improve the comprehensibility of the information about data handling practices provided to the data subjects, which plays a crucial role to obtain informed consent. Privacy icon sets have already been developed, but they differ in the kinds of information they depict and in the perspectives they embed. Moreover, they have not met widespread adoption, one reasons being that research has shown that possibility of misinterpretation of these symbols. Our research relies on legal Semantic Web technologies and principles drawn from legal design and Human Computer Interaction to propose visualizations of privacy policies and consent forms. The final aim is to enhance the communication of data practices to users and to support their decision about whether to give or withhold consent.