User interfaces for privacy agents

Most people do not often read privacy policies because they tend to be long and difficult to understand. The Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) addresses this problem by providing a standard machine-readable format for website privacy policies. P3P user agents can fetch P3P privacy policies automatically, compare them with a user's privacy preferences, and alert and advise the user. Developing user interfaces for P3P user agents is challenging for several reasons: privacy policies are complex, user privacy preferences are often complex and nuanced, users tend to have little experience articulating their privacy preferences, users are generally unfamiliar with much of the terminology used by privacy experts, users often do not understand the privacy-related consequences of their behavior, and users have differing expectations about the type and extent of privacy policy information they would like to see. We developed a P3P user agent called Privacy Bird. Our design was informed by privacy surveys and our previous experience with prototype P3P user agents. We describe our design approach, compare it with the approach used in other P3P use agents, evaluate our design, and make recommendations to designers of other privacy agents. © 2006 ACM.