Privacy policies are known to be impenetrable, lengthy, tedious texts that are hardly read and poorly understood. Therefore, the new EU legal framework for data protection, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), introduces provisions to enhance information transparency and suggests icons as visual means to clarify data practices.
Notwithstanding the many benefits in terms of e.g. comprehension that legal visualizations demonstrably provide, visual communication can take many different shapes. The scientific debate around graphical symbols for legal concepts is still in its infancy. Both the creation and consequent evaluation of icons depicting abstract or unfamiliar concepts represent a challenge. Moreover, precision of representation can support the individuals’ sense-making, but at the expense of simplicity and usability.
We present DaPIS, the Data Protection Icon Set that we created and evaluated through human-centred methods drawn from the emerging discipline of legal design. Firstly, we have organized rounds of participatory design sprints where designers and lawyers collaborated side by side. Then, we ran some user studies to empirically determine strengths and weaknesses of the icon set as communicative means for the legal sphere.
The icon set is modelled on PrOnto, an ontological representation of the GDPR, and is organized around its core modules: personal data, roles and agents, processing operations, processing purposes, legal bases, and data subjects’ rights. In combination with the description of a privacy policy in the legal standard XML Akoma Ntoso, such an approach makes the icons machine-readable and semi-automatically retrievable. Icons can thus serve as information markers in lengthy privacy statements and support the navigation of the text by the reader. In this way, we aim to map and connect different representations of legal information to enhance its comprehensibility: the lawyer-readable, the machine-readable, and the human-readable.
More information about the research can be found at: http://gdprbydesign.cirsfid.unibo.it.
Related Session:
October 11th, 2018
Session III.B. The (R)Evolution of Data Visualisation in Law
16:30-18:15
Sala Strozzi of Natural History Museum of the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Florence