Reconciling the what, when and how of privacy notifications in fitness tracking scenarios

The increasing number of fitness tracking wearables deployed worldwide poses challenges to the privacy of their users, esp. in terms of transparency. Privacy notifications facilitate transparency by providing users with situational awareness about the pro-cessing of their personal data. We present the results of two online surveys including English-speaking (n(Eng) = 154) and German-speaking (n(Ger) = 150) users of fitness track-ing devices from Europe, conducted to elicit determinants of notification settings. We found evidence for the perceived usefulness of privacy notifications, and for concordant predictors in terms of when and how users prefer to be notified about personal data processing in 12 scenarios related to fitness tracking