Research project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer ProtectionConsent 2.0: Development and validation of recommendations in order to support consumers’ privacy consent

Personal data is collected and processed in many different situations. There exist legal obligations on how consumers should be informed in a transparent manner. However, in practice consumers are often inadequately informed about data processing and "blindly" consent to it. In order to inform consumers better the so-called privacy-one-pager has been developed. It summarizes the essential information of a lengthily privacy policy on one page in a standardized form. However, it has not yet been explored whether the privacy-one-pager indeed informs consumers in a better way.

The aim of the ConPolicy study is therefore to evaluate the effectiveness of the privacy-one-pager, to classify the results, to examine further solutions, and to derive recommendations for actions. The overarching aim of the study is to show through which measures decision-making situations should be designed so that consumers are able to act according to their individual privacy preferences as simple and informed as possible.

In order to complete the project methods from analytical as well as applied consumer research were applied including a systematic literature review, an online choice experiment and an online field study.

The study can be downloaded here (German). A summary of the study can be found here (German).