I've been working on user centered
design in the privacy space for a long
time now I think that often when we
develop privacy tools the user side is
the most often forgotten side you know
it's great that we have sophisticated
privacy controls but if they don't make
sense to users then users won't use them
they'll ignore them they may not even be
aware that they exist in the first place
and so the way to improve on that is to
actually do studies with users and find
out first of all what users are looking
for what their needs are from a privacy
tool and then and then to test your
prototypes with users and see what's
working what's not working and do it in
context so you can show somebody an
interface and point to it and say hey do
you know what this button is all right
can you this is wording makes sense and
they might you know give you a pretty
good answer but if instead you point
somebody in a privacy tool and ask them
how they would accomplish a specific
task or what do they think they could do
with this interface now in context it
may turn out that they have no idea and
it's actually need needs a lot of work
to be improved so that's the kind of
work that we've been doing in in our lab
at Carnegie Mellon working with users
and trying to find approaches to address
these sorts of problems so I think
companies need to loop users into the
process from the beginning so they need
to do surveys or focus groups with their
customers or the types of people who are
in their target audience find out what
their needs are related to privacy what
their preconceived notions are related
to privacy and make sure that their
privacy interfaces address those needs
once they have interfaces either
prototype or it is already existing in
their products they need to actually
test with users from that target
population to make sure that it's
actually working for users