Personalized transparency: A scoping review of approaches to personalized privacy disclosures

Transparency requirements are a central building block of privacy regulations across the world. In practice, though, the transparency practices of service providers and sellers have well-known limitations, from being too complex to being too long. With personalization technologies, personalizing information disclosures emerges as a promising solution to address individuals’ information needs. Nevertheless, a literature review regarding the concept of “personalized transparency,” its practical implementations, and the current state of research in the field is in need. To bridge this gap, we conducted an interdisciplinary scoping review and identified 42 relevant publications that address personalized transparency. We analyzed the source, proposed tools, functions, and the context of personalized transparency, along with preparatory work. Based on the scoping review, we identified five key functions of personalized transparency: the core functions of explanation, user control, and personalized disclosure, and the supplementary functions of personalized recommendation and automated decision-making. Personalized transparency can be defined as the practice of tailoring information disclosure to individual users’ preferences in order to enhance their understanding and control. Additionally, we discuss legal and design implications of our findings and future research on personalized transparency.