Icons, Transparency, and Data Protection – how might we translate legal provisions into tiny visual elements?

EITLab Series of Seminar, Jean Monnet module “European IT Law by Design” (co-funded by the EU Erasmus + program), Faculté de Droit et Criminologie, UCLouvain – 28 February, h. 9.30-10.20

In data protection regulations, informing users about the practices of personal data collection and processing is a central tenet for lawfulness and a crucial means to implement the principle of transparency. Although this information is usually disclosed through privacy policies, Article 12(7) of the General Data Protection Regulation provides for standardised icons as an admissible way to communicate to users what happens to their data.
But what kind of communication can pictograms enable? And what is the current state of the research on data protection icons and can their efficacy be investigated? Several organizations are currently creating icon sets – however, these emerging initiatives follow different methodologies and have different goals: icons can prominently display risks deriving from data processing to enable informed consent, they can support the navigation of textual privacy policies, or they can be used in privacy dashboards as data subjects’ gateways to the exercise of their rights.
In this seminar, we will explore several questions:

• What is the function of the icons enshrined by the GDPR?
• To which extent can the GDPR icons implement the principle of transparency?
• What is the current state of research on icons amongst other transparency-enhancing measures and which results can be expected?
• How can privacy icons be designed and tested?