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On using privacy labels for visualizing the privacy practice of SMEs: challenges and research directions

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M.S. Bargh, M. Mosselaar,van de, P.W.M. Rutten, R. Choenni | Conference contribution | Publication date: 14 September 2022
Privacy is a comprehensive notion which is hard to grasp for the layman. To make the privacy notion tangible, creating transparency about privacy practices is an important necessity. Transparency about privacy practices is traditionally (sought to be) established via providing privacy policies and privacy seals. These traditional transparency mechanisms have resulted in limited success in society, where digital transformation takes place with a fast pace. To address these challenges, privacy visualization via a label representation, like energy and food labels, is considered a promising solution direction. Visualizing privacy, in general, and using privacy labels, in particular, are not straightforward in practice due to, among others, the subjectivity and context dependency of privacy and the adverse (side) impacts of privacy violations. This practicality issue is more evident for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SME's) because, compared to large enterprises, they have limited resources for protecting and managing the personal data they process. In this contribution, we investigate the capabilities and limitations of a privacy label and its labeling tool for use by SMEs in three business domains. Accordingly, and within SME settings, we identify the following directions for future research: Enhancing trust in privacy labels, dealing with network aspects, adopting privacy labels and labeling tools, using the labeling process and outcome for auditing own privacy practice, and improving the current privacy labels and labeling tools.

Author(s) - affiliated with Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences

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