Visualizing Past Personal Data Disclosures

Today's rich service offer in the World Wide Web increasingly requires the disclosure of personal user data. Service providers' appetite for personal user data, however, is accompanied by growing privacy implications for Internet users. Addressing this rising threat, privacy-enhancing technologies aim at aiding users in protecting their personal data. Even though effective privacy laws facilitate users to edit and revoke already disclosed personal data, few PET solutions support users in exercising this right. Available tools lack intuitive interfaces and are built on powerful infrastructures on the provider side. In this paper we introduce the Data Disclosure Log component within a user-centric privacy architecture. Built on a browser-based logging extension, we present a visualization tool that displays past personal data disclosures from different perspectives. A graph-based view allows for the dynamic presentation of relations between selected entity types. Such an overview enables users to know the conditions of past personal data transactions at any time. This knowledge represents a prerequisite for an ex post revision or revocation of personal data. Usability and user acceptance of the developed prototype is evaluated in a conducted user test.