Designing Usable and Useful Privacy Choice Interfaces

Speaker: Prof. Lorrie Cranor, Carnegie Mellon University, United States

Abstract: Users who wish to exercise privacy rights or make privacy choices must often rely on website or app user interfaces. However, too often, these user interfaces suffer from usability deficiencies ranging from being difficult to find, hard to understand, or time-consuming to use, to being deceptive and dangerously misleading. This talk will discuss user-centric approaches to designing and evaluating privacy interfaces that better meet user needs and reduce the overwhelming number of privacy choices. I'll present a privacy choice mechanism evaluation framework and several examples of privacy interface design and evaluation from my research, including more usable cookie consent banners, mobile app privacy nutrition labels, IoT privacy and security labels, and a privacy options icon for the State of California.

Biography: Lorrie Faith Cranor is the Director and Bosch Distinguished Professor of the CyLab Security and Privacy Institute and FORE Systems University Professor of Computer Science and of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. She directs the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (CUPS) and co-directs the Privacy Engineering masters program. In 2016 she served as Chief Technologist at the US Federal Trade Commission. She co-founded Wombat Security Technologies. She is a fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and AAAS and a member of the ACM CHI Academy. More information can be found here.

Host: Prof. Marc Langheinrich