Increasing the Salience of Data Use Opt-outs Online

Copyright is held by the author/owner. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee. Poster presented at the 13th Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2017). Abstract Prior work has shown that many individuals are concerned about their privacy but feel resigned with respect to their abilities to manage or protect their privacy. At the same time, individuals may not be aware of privacy choices that are available to them. For instance, many privacy policies contain links that allow users to opt out of certain data use practices, such as the use or sharing of contact information for marketing purposes. We propose a method to make such privacy choices more salient to Internet users. Based on an approach to automatically identify and classify optout choices in privacy policies, we designed a browser extension that notifies users about available opt-out choices on the websites they visit. The goal of our work is to not only make users aware of available choices but also make it easier for them to utilize those choices.