What is it about?

In this 10 participant study, we explored people's experiences of using GDPR access rights to retrieve their own personal data, and explored whether the responses helped people meet their goals. We also uncovered impacts on trust and a lack of empowerment and suggestion improvements to policy and practice.

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Why is it important?

In today's data centric world, people are losing control of their data. Through the GDPR and the DSA, the European Union is leading the way in data rights policy. But we need to know whether these rights are honoured in practice, and indeed whether they work. This work shows that while GDPR is a great start, more is needed both in the practical handling of GDPR requests but also in terms of improving policy itself. This is vital to ensure that stated goals of empowering individuals with their personal data can actually be met in practice.

Perspectives

For me, human experience of technology is everything. Good interface designs or well meaning policies are worth nothing unless they make a material difference to people's lives. I am passionate about human-centric thinking and harnessing and improving data access capabilities is a critical first step on people's journey towards taking control of their own personal data ecosystem.

Alex Bowyer
Newcastle University

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Human-GDPR Interaction: Practical Experiences of Accessing Personal Data, April 2022, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3491102.3501947.
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