Overview of Usable Privacy Research: Major Themes and Research Directions

A wide variety of literature exists on privacy across different communities and disciplines, including Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Privacy literature is also scattered within HCI, considering that HCI has evolved from its origins to include a variety of disciplines. Therefore, this section is not intended to provide an exhaustive list of HCI privacy literature references. We explored the literature on usable privacy with a focus on the interaction and usability pillars of HCI, using the definition of usable privacy. Our search was narrowed to publications in reputed and high-quality journals and venues within and related to the privacy and security research field to categorise major themes and trends. Various themes are discussed in this section, including usable privacy research in the Internet of Things (IoT), inclusive privacy, usable privacy for developers, usable privacy for Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs), visual privacy, and efforts to help people make better privacy decisions with usable privacy notices and choices. For each theme, we discuss pertinent literature and complete our discussion with existing problems, gaps, and future directions.