photograph of cups CUPS - CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory - Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Privacy Nutrition Labels

The CUPS lab has been developing a "privacy nutrition label" to make privacy policies easy to understand and compare. We've written several papers about our work on the privacy nutrition label, and implemented an online demo of the label in Privacy Finder. One of our papers was featured in the Future of Privacy Forum's 2010 Privacy Papers for Policy Makers Journal. In 2010, the privacy nutrition label idea started becoming popular when the Federal Trade Commission recommended a privacy nutrition label approach.

The label is a work in progress. Here is an example policy formatted in the latest design we are currently testing. And here is that same example policy formatted in an even shorter form.

Try a Privacy Finder search and click on a privacy report link to see a privacy label generated automatically.

Downloads

Credits

The Privacy Label was developed by members of the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory with support from the U.S. Army Research Office, Carnegie Mellon University CyLab, NSF Cyber Trust User-Controllable Security and Privacy for Pervasive Computing, by Microsoft through the Carnegie Mellon Center for Computational Thinking, FCT through the CMU/Portugal Information and Communication Technologies Institute, and the IBM OCR project on Privacy and Security Policy Management.

The label design team was led by Patrick Gage Kelley and included Joanna Bresee, Aleecia McDonald, Robert Reeder, Sungjoon Steve Won, and Lorrie Cranor. Additional thanks go to Cristian Bravo-Lillo, Lucian Cesca, Robert McGuire, Daniel Rhim, Norman Sadeh, and Janice Tsai.

Contact Us

For more information about this or our other privacy work, please contact CUPS Director, Lorrie Cranor.