Balancing Privacy and Data Utilization: A Comparative Vignette Study on User Acceptance of Data Trustees in Germany and the US
Leona Lassak
Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2025 · Day 2 · Privacy & Usability 2
This talk, presented by Leona Lassak, delves into the nascent concept of **data trustees** as a potential solution to the pervasive problem of opaque and untransparent data sharing in modern society. As individuals increasingly generate vast amounts of data through online activities, smart devices, vehicles, and medical records, there is a growing concern about who accesses this data, how it is used, and who ultimately benefits. The core idea of a data trustee is to introduce a trusted **intermediary** between the **data subject** (the individual) and the **data user** (the entity utilizing the data), allowing for more controlled, privacy-preserving, and transparent data sharing based on the user's explicit preferences.
AI review
Competent empirical work on user acceptance of data trustees — methodologically sound, cross-cultural, and large enough to be credible. The findings are useful for policy designers and privacy engineers, but this is a social science study at a security conference: the insights are incremental rather than surprising, and the gap between what it reveals and what an informed practitioner already suspects is narrow.