Transparency in the Privacy Context: A Structured Literature Review

Transparency features, such as privacy policies and privacy seals, frequently offer users information about an online service’s collection and handling of personal data. While transparency is a heavily studied topic in the privacy context, the findings are equivocal, due to mixed results on the effects of transparency and heterogeneous conceptualizations of the term transparency. This is worrisome as transparency is widely recognized as a key instrument to empower users and guide their decisions, making the effects of transparency of fundamental importance for regulators, online service providers, and users. To address missing conceptual clarity and differing effects of transparency, we conducted a structured literature review on transparency in the privacy context. We extract three distinct conceptualizations of transparency and two subdimensions of privacy information, which impact user decisions. We provide a research agenda for future studies, investigating the effects of transparency in the privacy context