Towards a Visual Vocabulary for Privacy Concepts

Abstract

Designing privacy controls that are intuitive for end users involves several challenges. Graphic representations could certainly contribute to tackle such challenges, however, a visual vocabulary for privacy solutions is currently lacking. To contribute to that end, in this paper we report a review of online images related to privacy. We identify graphic representations that illustrate privacy objects, mechanisms and actions, and categorize them according to the concepts covered. Seeking to develop a set of icons to illustrate privacy concepts, we analyze online contents publicly available from social media and extract representations that commonly refer to privacy concepts. The contributions of this paper include: (1) a set of graphics that represent privacy mechanisms, objects and actions; and (2) a vocabulary for such graphic representation. The evidence is drawn from the analysis and discussion of 241 images selected by the authors from ten online image repositories.