A Value-centered Exploration of Data Privacy and Personalized Privacy Assistants

In the current post-GDPR landscape, privacy notices have become ever more prevalent on our phones and online. However, these notices are not well suited to their purpose of helping users make informed decisions. I suggest that instead of utilizing notice to elicit informed consent, we could repurpose privacy notices to create the space for more meaningful, value-centered user decisions. Value-centered privacy decisions, or those that accurately reflect who we are and what we value, encapsulate the intuitive role of personal values in data privacy decisions. To explore how we could design for such decisions, I utilize Suzy Killmister’s Four-Dimensional Theory of Autonomy (4DT) to operationalize value-centered privacy decisions. I then utilize 4DT to help design a system—called a value-centered privacy assistant (VcPA)—that could help create the space for value-centered data privacy decisions using privacy notices. Using this 4DT lens, I further assess the degree that an existing technology, personalized privacy assistants (PPAs), use notices in a manner that allows for value-centered decision-making. I lastly utilize insights from the PPA assessment to inform the design of a VcPA, concluding that a VcPA could utilize notices to assist users in value-centered app selection and in other data privacy decisions.