A Design Space for Privacy Choices: Towards Meaningful Privacy Control in the Internet of Things

“Notice and choice” is the predominant approach for data privacy protection today. There is considerable user-centered research on providing effective privacy notices but not enough guidance on designing privacy choices. Recent data privacy regulations worldwide established new requirements for privacy choices, but system practitioners struggle to implement legally compliant privacy choices that also provide users meaningful privacy control. We construct a design space for privacy choices based on a user-centered analysis of how people exercise privacy choices in real-world systems. This work contributes a conceptual framework that considers privacy choice as a user-centered process as well as a taxonomy for practitioners to design meaningful privacy choices in their systems. We also present a use case of how we leverage the design space to finalize the design decisions for a real-world privacy choice platform, the Internet of Things (IoT) Assistant, to provide meaningful privacy control in the IoT.