Transparency of privacy notices and contextualisation: effectively conveying information without words

Data protection regulations require that website visitors provide their informed consent before their personal data are collected. However, privacy notices are often misunderstood. We claim that the context of the notice, i.e. the visitor's action preceding their appearance, can affect its comprehension. In two studies with an ad hoc website (N = 132, 128), we either preserved the sequential connection between the notice and the action triggering it or broke it with a delay. We also manipulated the reference to the triggering action in the notice's title. The participants' comprehension, perceived comprehension, and response were measured. In a third study (N = 91), we investigated how different contexts (i.e. generic vs. specific) affect the participants' interpretation of the notice. Overall, the results suggest that the action preceding the notice affects the identification of its cause (studies 1, 2, and 3) and the interpretation of its content (study 3), whereas the explicit content of the notice does not. The acceptance of the notice does not seem to directly follow an improvement in comprehension, as would be foreseen by the transparency paradox. Considering the sequential context in which the notice appears seems then a good design practice to achieve genuine comprehension.