Facilitating Privacy Attitudes & Behaviors with Affective Visual Design

We all too often must consent to information collection at an early stage of digital interactions, during application sign-up. Paying low attention to privacy policies, we are rarely aware of processing practices. Drawing on multidisciplinary research, we hypothesize that privacy policies presenting information in a way that triggers affective responses, combined with intrinsic characteristics of an individual, may influence privacy attitudes. Through an online quasi-experiment (N=88), we investigate how affect, illustration type, individual characteristics and privacy concerns may influence willingness to disclose personal information and privacy awareness. Our results partially confirm these assumptions. We found that the affect may have an impact on privacy awareness. The willingness to disclose is not affected by visual design but by stable psychological constructs. We discuss the applicability of our findings in interface design and for future research.