Explainer: Data Education & Awareness
Empowering People with Controls
Most digital services don't collect data just to collect data. Instead, they use that data to create a unique experience for you.
Scroll to discover moreHow much control do you think you have in the decisions you make online?
We make decisions, yes. But do we really have a choice?
Because, even though we “agree” we’re not always as in control as we’d like.
Making truly empowered decisions about our data is rarely as simple as clicking a single button.
Maybe it depends on how long the data will be stored for, or who else can see it.
Maybe it's about protecting the people around us, especially when those people are children.
Maybe it's about who's in charge...
...and whether there will be any consequences if you hand over the data.
Do we feel more or less in control when we’ve had time to think through the consequences?
When it comes to being in control and having a real choice - how empowered are you in these situations?
What about when you make decisions in the digital world?
Do you feel like you're making empowered choices there?
If, as a creator of digital services, you’re committed to giving people more control...
When you want someone’s genuine and empowered consent, stop and consider how their choice might be constrained.
Digital services offer us new ways of negotiating control between people and services they use.
Let’s stop and consider how we might design to actively empower people’s choices around their data.
Empowering people with true control is a complicated task.
As Richard Gomer, Research Fellow at the University of Southampton writes, "We want to help people avoid unforeseen consequences, but in a way that is not disruptive; we want to deliver transparency through useful and relevant information, but must also work within the limits of people’s bounded rationality; and we want to design things at scale which are useful to very diverse audiences of complex individuals."
It’s a challenge TTC Labs is actively exploring, as we work with product creators, regulators and privacy experts to build new modes of thinking around trust and transparency.
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Welcome to TTC Labs, where we design for trust, transparency and control (TTC).
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