PRIVACY LABEL — Part V: Next steps
Part V of a blog series about privacy, and how we can raise awareness through a universal privacy label.
In the process of developing our Privacy Label project, we have given presentations and talked with several experts and stakeholders. In what follows, we want to share some updates on the revisions of the project and our plans for enhancing it further.
What we’ve been up to
Based on the feedback we received from experts, we iterated on the Privacy Label design and created a simpler version, which is easier to understand and comes across as more iconic. This way, we believe that the concept becomes much more accessible for the wide target audience that we are aiming to reach.
In order to better explain the concept of Privacy Label from the user’s perspective, we also made a video that showed how the labels can be incorporated into daily life. The video illustrates the ways in which Privacy Label functions in different parts of the city and encourages the user to take informed actions.
In the meantime, we’ve got some exciting news as well. Privacy Label won not only the Gold, but also the Jury Prize at the European Design Awards that took place in Warsaw this year. We are very proud of this achievement, which emphasized the high potential of our project once more. Now, it’s time to refine both the conceptual and practical aspects in order to demonstrate how Privacy Label contributes to public life.
Upcoming plans
Our plan for making further progress with Privacy Label consists of four steps. Firstly, we want to have more conversations with privacy experts to refine the ranking system. To achieve this, we will need to revise the content of the questions that shape the ranking process and indicate different levels of privacy. Next to this, we will explore applicable organizational models in order to define how to issue labels and maintain the Privacy Label system in the long run.
Following these steps, we are going to conduct user tests to encourage public discussions and get feedback. Currently, we are in contact with two municipalities in the Netherlands to find test locations. Implementing these tests are very valuable as they will help us understand how well people would be engaged with the labels and what needs to be done to improve this engagement.
Lastly, we envision that Privacy Label can extend into an online platform that informs citizens about how good their privacy is protected and what kind of alternatives they have. For example, if a certain grocery store has a label which indicates a low privacy ranking, then the platform can recommend other stores with a better ranking. This platform will also have a service provider role that allows people to report privacy breaches and talk further about why certain places have lower rankings if that is not communicated clearly. This way, Privacy Label will function as a discussion panel to actively engage people with privacy issues in their city.
We now aim to follow these steps in order to get much closer to the actualization of Privacy Label in public life, both online and offline. Do you have any thoughts or questions on our project, or on privacy issues in general? Get in touch with us, we appreciate any feedback and are happy to share our knowledge.
Read more
If you want to know more about the development process of Privacy Label, please take a look at our previous articles exploring the current state of privacy in Part I, what privacy is, why it matters and how we rank it in Part II, visually communicating the complex ideas of privacy in Part III and Crafting a Universal Privacy System in Part IV.
Contact
For more information please contact Gert Franke via gert@sensorlab.nl. We’re also happy to share our knowledge.
Privacy Label is developed by CLEVER°FRANKE within Sensor Lab’s research program ‘Demystifying the Smart City’. This research is supported by the Creative Industries Fund NL.
