A Usability Study on the Privacy Policy Visualization Model

Privacy policies are known to be one of the least favorite pieces of any website, software installation or any other agreement between a service provider and data provider. Due to the extreme importance of privacy policies, there have been attempts to make privacy policies more readable to the users. The Privacy Policy Visualization Model (PPVM) is considered to be the first model that simplifies the policies by visualizing them to the users. Although it is an important attempt towards privacy awareness, it is important to examine the usability of this privacy enhancing technology. This paper studies the usability of such model at the user level. We evaluate the PPVM based on STARP heuristic evaluation framework to inspect privacy usability vulnerabilities and suggest some solutions to overcome some usability problems encountered during evaluation.