  This paper addresses the question whether the recently proposed approach of
concise privacy notices in apps and on websites is effective in raising user
awareness. To assess the effectiveness in a realistic setting, we included
concise notices in a fictitious but realistic fitness tracking app and asked
participants recruited from an online panel to provide their feedback on the
usability of the app as a cover story. Importantly, after giving feedback,
users were also asked to recall the data practices described in the notices.
The experimental setup included the variation of different levels of saliency
and riskiness of the privacy notices. Based on a total sample of 2,274
participants, our findings indicate that concise privacy notices are indeed a
promising approach to raise user awareness for privacy information when
displayed in a salient way, especially in case the notices describe risky data
practices. Our results may be helpful for regulators, user advocates and
transparency-oriented companies in creating or enforcing better privacy
transparency towards average users that do not read traditional privacy
policies.
