Increasing Privacy Awareness of Terms and Conditions of a Service

Internet services and applications are an important part of daily life now, but their lengthy terms of service, terms and conditions, and privacy policies are rarely read. This creates a lack of awareness around what data is collected from users and how it is used, which can encourage users to blindly accept terms and raises concerns for their personal privacy. To solve this issue, this research looked into how to create a design philosophy that would help increase the awareness of users while they accept the terms and conditions of a service. The design focuses on being easy to access without disrupting the sign-up process, so a browser extension was chosen for this project. The summaries needed to be easy to read without overwhelming the user, and the button for summarizing the page needed to be obvious and easy to understand. These steps were confirmed within the user study of the project. Users interacted with a tool designed with the above steps and agreed overwhelmingly that it was intuitive to use and helped them understand the risks of the given site. Most users said they would use this tool on a regular basis, while others said they would rather stay ignorant.