Visualizing privacy: design and development of a privacy
management component

Abstract: This Master’s Thesis in Media Engineering has been performed at Ericsson in
Stockholm, Sweden.

Advances in technology and new services for mobile systems come with an
increased concern for privacy. In this thesis, this issue is addressed by
describing a privacy and trust mechanism that will allow the users to manage
and create their privacy settings within a larger mobile system. The
functionality and possible designs of a visual component for managing privacy
has been developed in order achieve an increased understanding of privacy for
the system’s users. This visual component, called The Privacy Display Widget,
has been developed for and integrated within a project called MobiLife
(2004).

A number of research questions have been approached in order to gain a better
understanding of privacy in online and mobile systems and also to better
understand the user’s needs when it comes to privacy management.

This master’s thesis describes the design process for the graphical user
interface of the visual component. The underlying functionality is also
described as well as privacy management in general and in the system in
question. The results of the design process, a set of visualization concepts
for the privacy management component, are illustrated and evaluated using
expert and heuristic evaluations. Using the knowledge gained through
literature studies and the design process, there will then be a discussion of
the research questions approached in this thesis.