Privacy Dashboards: Control and Understanding of Data through Usability and User Experience
Summary
With the rising trend of big data, activity trackers, and dashboards, privacy is more important than ever. In this thesis, an intuitive way was researched for the user to understand and control his data in dashboards. This was done in two steps. The first step encapsulated the design expectations of the user by means of a questionnaire about usability, privacy, and data sharing. The results indicate that a user’s understanding of what happens to his data is more important than having control over said data. The second step was the making of a design, a prototype, and eventually the implementation, of privacy settings in a dashboard. This implementation was evaluated in a field test. Although the results must be taken with caution, because of the limited number of respondents, the results suggest that the implemented design was user-friendly. Even though both steps combined form no conclusive result, they indicate that the design may serve as a basis for future research. More research should be done to confirm these indications.