Revamping the Privacy Policy: A Study on Informed Consent and User Interactions

Privacy is an abstract concept that has very real repercussions for users of technology in the twenty-first century. Recent large-scale controversies such as the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal bring into question users’ understandings of what companies are allowed to do with their data. The primary method of communicating privacy rights to users is the privacy policy; however, these policies are not always effective at gaining users’ informed consent regarding their rights. This thesis will attempt to show the effectiveness of privacy policies at gaining informed consent through an experiment showing the impact of different display factors on users’ understanding.