Together with Privacy Company I am working on a Privacy Label. It offers an easy to understand summary of a privacy policy. It helps organisations better communicate how they use data. The goal is not to replace privacy policy, but to offer something additional to it. Something in between reading an entire policy, and just blindly clicking on “I agree”.
Work in progress
The Project is currently in the testing phase. Together with a number of pioneering organisations we are testing the usefulness of our design, and improving it where necessary.
Openness
We want this label to be widely adopted, so we’re sharing it as an open standard that is free to use for anyone.
to aid adoption, we’re developing a set of tools for people to create the labels. One is the “Quick tool” (pictured below), which is designed to manage one or two labels. One of its features is that it offers templates to help users get started quickly.
There is also a Label Manager tool which allows you to manage a large collection of labels.
The javascript library that both of these tools build on is also open source, and will soon be released. The idea is that companies that offer data management services (used to keep track of all the types of data an organisation collects) could offer their customers an “export to a privacy label” option.
Fun!
The label may seem simple on the surface, but has been incredible challenging. Everything is thought through to a very high degree. I could tell you about every little choice in detail. It has made this project a lot of fun too, and very rewarding. I’ve learnt a lot more about (the politics of) privacy law in the process.
It’s not a quality stamp, it’s more like an ingredient list for digital projects.
– Coen Steenhuisen, my ‘colleague’ in this project who works at Privacy Company
Future
As the label reaches a 1.0 state, we’ll shift our focus to spreading the word, and getting it integrated into existing data management solutions.
Thanks to
Coen Steenhuisen, Frank Koppejan and the entire Privacy Company crew. The project is kindly supported by ECP, Surf and the SIDN foundation, who have provided both funding and valuable feedback. The feedback from the Dutch universities and companies who were kind enough to beta test and share their use cases was invaluable. Finally, there’s a lot of gratitude to the volunteers who are helping to translate. Thank you all!
