Data Privacy in Ride-Sharing Services: From an Analysis of Common Practices to Improvement of User Awareness.

Individuals are frequently confronted with privacy-related decisions under uncertainty especially in online contexts. The resulting privacy concerns are a decisive factor for individuals to (not) use online services. In order to support individuals to make more informed decisions, we assess the current state of practice of certain online services. This analysis is focused on ride-sharing and includes popular services in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland and we investigate how they handle user data. The results show that services include a wide-ranging set of personal data and lack standardization. Furthermore, they offer limited privacy-related features. Based on this analysis, we developed a Transparency Enhancing Technology in the form of a browser extension that informs users about data practices of the services at the time of data disclosure. In addition to this, we conducted a scenario-based online experiment with a representative sample to evaluate the usability of our tool and its effect on users' concerns and behavior. Results show significant improvements in awareness and decision reflection with limited decrease in disclosure rates of personal data.