The Association for Competitive Technology today launched the next generation of its App Privacy Icons, the App Privacy Dashboard. ACT was widely recognized for its leadership in the app industry when it collaborated with consumer group PrivacyChoice.org, Moms with Apps, app developers, and design experts to create its first self-regulatory effort. The Dashboard was unveiled at the NTIA App Privacy meeting receiving wide acclaim from industry and privacy advocates alike.
The App Privacy Dashboard
Not content to rest on its laurels, ACT has continued innovating and testing new designs to produce an improved privacy display for mobile devices. The App Privacy Dashboard takes the easily recognizable App Privacy Icons and optimizes their display to fill a smartphone screen. The Dashboard also provides additional layers of information so a user can click on an icon to learn more about the specific data usage they care about.
In this release, ACT applied lessons learned from consumer testing of its App Privacy Icons and earlier iterations of app privacy displays. In what comes as no surprise to UX experts, we found users more likely to quickly grasp information presented to them in a graphical display as opposed to lines of text. But the key improvement our latest release offers is that it easily facilitates layered privacy policies. By presenting the icons in a format users are familiar navigating, we are able to link each data category to a more expansive description in easy-to-read text.
To see and test an example of the privacy dashboard, ACT created a prototype describing the data usage of its own app created for its members visiting Washington. We used short-form descriptions of data uses already provided by industry groups that help app makers create privacy policies including TRUSTe and PrivacyChoice. ACT presented this at NTIA and it was very well received. To see the dashboard in practice (best viewed on a mobile phone), visit http://j.mp/privacydashboard.
