#privacyux

This year's World Usability Day featured "Design for Good or Evil", and I got the opportunity to attend the Hamburg edition of this always-inspiring global community event. With a topic so close to my heart, it was great to attend a range of sessions surrounding design ethics and meet interesting people.

This follow-up on the "layered approach" discusses the EDPB guidelines’ suggestions for shaping the transparency information itself: content, language, accessibility, intelligibility, etc.

The EDPB’s official “Guidelines on Transparency” under GDPR are a valuable, yet little-known, resource for designers. In this article, I examine the 40-pager for contributions on putting individuals in control of their personal data through user-centred design - beyond compliance […]

OpenMapTiles allows for efficient self-hosting of embeddable OSM maps without significant resource requirements and with reasonable effort for a web professional.

The issue with tracking is not only one of obvious trackers but that, at least in theory, every piece of content loaded from other sites than the originating domain enables some degree of tracking.

Creating something that has not existed before is at the core of the activity named "design". Yet sometimes, not creating something is the best way to create something. The thought of "undesign" - maybe not using that term in such reflected manner - is nothing new to most designers: a designer given the task to solve a certain challenge might well come to the conclusion that creating something new is not the best solution. [...]

With the constantly decreasing threshold to gather, process and store more and more data points, ever more bits and pieces of information are translated into bytes and stored away on the never-ending harddrives of the so called "cloud". Undeniably, there is great potential in data. However, the question needs to be asked: How much data is too much data? In the fight to reverse the trend of excessive and uncontrolled storage of personal data and to put its human owners into focus through distributed solutions, a discussion on "data obesity" and approaches like MAD should be part of any design process involving user data. [...]

My previous post on Privacy-Aware Design ("Replacing Google Analytics with a decentralized alternative") discussed the inherent privacy issue when a private corporation is able to track users around a large part of the internet. I presented how the provision of a free service with undeniable benefits for website owners has led to a situation where Google is able to track any internet user around half of the web and that it happens without explicit consent of the end-users (who may only protect themselves from being tracked by browser privacy add-ons). Following the same train of thought, the next topic in this series are social media integration practices. [...]

In late 2005, Google started to provide free access to a web analytics product based on the previously expensive Urchin software suite. In the seven years since, this strategy succeeded to get Google Analytics tracking code included in a stunning share of websites by providing access to a powerful tool at (seemingly) no cost for everyone from big corporations to hobbyist bloggers. "Oh, and we'll of course add Google Analytics to the site" is a common phrase in the context of a web project, by large agencies and teenage family webmasters alike: Google has managed to define their product as an implicit standard for visitor analysis on the web. Adding the tracking code is easy and the data the service provides is of unquestionable quality. Yet, privacy advocates have long pointed out the serious implications of one corporation being able to track users around such a massive slice of the internet [...]

On January 28, Data Privacy Day encouraged everyone to make protecting privacy and data a greater priority; a good trigger to start a long-planned series on some things I have been working on over the last year. With "Privacy-Aware Design", I aim to create a discussion around privacy as encountered by interaction designers on the UI/UX level. I consider it important to acknowledge that the protection of users' information is not just rooted in the service concept (data collection, sharing, visibility) or purely an engineering challenge in the background (encryption, access control, data storage in general), but that privacy is also deeply affected by design decisions on the user-facing interfaces of internet services. [...]