Reconciling the What, When and How of Privacy Notifications in mHealth

• The increasing number of mobile health (mhealth) devices deployed worldwide poses challenges to the privacy of their users, especially in terms of transparency. Privacy notifications constitute a conceptual means to facilitate transparency by providing users with situational awareness pertaining to the processing of their personal data. We present the results of two online surveys with cohorts consisting of English-speaking (n = 154) and German-speaking (n = 150) users of mhealth devices, conducted to elicit viable determinants of notification settings. We found quantitative evidence for the usefulness of privacy notifications, and for concordant predictors in terms of when and how users prefer to be notified about what kind of scenario. We conclude by providing tangible design guidelines for usable Transparency-Enhancing Tools (TETs) that harness privacy notifications to facilitate transparency, and that help users make informed decisions and take action in response.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Människa-datorinteraktion (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Human Computer Interaction (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Datavetenskap (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Computer Sciences (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Annan data- och informationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Other Computer and Information Science (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Human-computer interaction (HCI)

Mobile health (mhealth)

Privacy notifications

User preferences

Transparency-enhancing tool (TET)

Computer Science

Datavetenskap

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

ovr (subject category)