A Model for Privacy Policy Visualization

Privacy is a leading concern for anyone that utilizes computing resources whether shopping on the Internet or visiting their doctor. Legislative acts require enterprises and data collectors to protect the privacy of their customers and data owners. Although privacy policy frameworks such as P3P assist data collectors in demonstrating their privacy policies to customers (i.e. publishing privacy policy on Web sites), insufficient research has been reported to help users visualize privacy policies. This paper presents a privacy policy visualization model based on the predicates of a privacy policy model. The key contribution is to provide a visualization model that facilitates understanding the policies for the data owners and provides the opportunity for the policy officers to better understand the designed policies. Finally, we demonstrate the model with a use case drawn from the policies of an online social network.