Advanced Privacy - Increase coherence
I would like to alert with the issue to the wording that is applied for the privacy settings within the /e/OS eco-system. The question whether the user needs to enable or disable a feature might be obvious for experienced users, but not necessarily for less experienced users.
In this issue I will relate mainly to Advanced Privacy – its name suggests that it is a collection of pro-privacy features for advanced users. At the same time the advanced privacy widget has been placed so prominently, that it is likely average users will want to use (and understand) it as well:
This leads me to 2 different issues within Advanced Privacy settings:
1) Coherence of the wording used
The Advanced Privacy settings allow the user to teak Trackers, Location and IP address.
- Trackers can be set to ‚vulnerable‘ or ‚denied‘
- Location can be set to ‚exposed‘ or ‚fake‘
- IP Address can be set to ‚exposed‘ or ‚hidden‘
My observation: the pairs of words are different for all three settings, apart from the colour code it is not obvious what is ‚good‘ and what ‚bad’. Moreover the terms that are used are mostly with a negative connotation ‘vulnerable’ and ‚denied‘ as well as ‚exposed‘ and ‚fake‘.
My conclusion: use the same kind of terminology in order to allow a maximum of transparency to users. That means in concrete terms:
- Block trackers – disable / enable
- Hide my real location - disable / enable
- Hide my real IP address - disable / enable
Additionally symbols could be used (such as https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.netclipart.com%2Fpp%2Fm%2F53-530290_lock-unlock-icon-free.png&f=1&nofb=1)
This should be extended ideally to other parts of the /e/OS eco-system (i.e. to the Browser – as other users have similar observations: https://community.e.foundation/t/advanced-privacy/41395/86)
2) Coherence of toggles
This may be a somewhat misleading title, I am aware of this….
Again, within Advanced Privacy the following things can be tweaked:
- Trackers
- Location
- IP Address
In the respective Advanced Privacy sub-menus of ‚Location‘ and ‚IP address‘ those can be manipulated and the user can influence whether location/IP address are exposed. For Trackers there is no respective option. This is not very coherent.
But most importantly, when the users disables advanced privacy this has an impact on all three sections (Trackers, Location/IP address), if all switched off, the respective sub-menus should be greyed out and not be accessible to the user.
This post is meant as continuation of a first one from a month ago: #5422 (closed)