What’s in an Icon? Promises and Pitfalls of Data Protection Iconography

Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), transparency of information becomes an obligation aimed at creating an ecosystem where data subjects understand and control what happens to their personal data. The definition of transparency stresses its user-centric nature, while design considerations to comply with this obligation assume central importance. This chapter focuses on the icons established by the GDPR Article 12.7 to off er ‘ a meaningful overview of the intended processing ’ . Existing attempts to represent data protection through icons have not met widespread adoption and reasons for the strengths and weaknesses of their creation and evaluation are discussed here. Building on this analysis, we present an empirical research proposing a new icon set that responds to GDPR requirements. The chapter also discusses the challenges of creating and evaluating such icon set and provides some future directions of research for eff ective implementation and standardisation.