Scrollytelling as an Alternative Format for Privacy Policies

2026-03-04

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenge of lengthy and opaque privacy policies that hinder users’ ability to provide informed consent. To enhance readability and comprehension, the authors propose the first application of scrollytelling—a scroll-driven narrative technique—to the presentation of privacy policies. They design and implement a web-based interactive prototype that tightly integrates dynamic visualizations with policy text, synchronized to user scrolling. An online experiment with 454 participants demonstrates that, compared to traditional plain text, this approach significantly reduces cognitive load, increases user engagement, and improves perceived format acceptability, while achieving comprehension accuracy on par with other state-of-the-art presentation methods. These findings validate the effectiveness of scrollytelling in balancing user experience with accurate understanding in privacy communication.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Privacy
• Natural Language Processing: Ethics — Bias, Fairness, Transparency & Privacy
• Humans and AI: User Experience and Usability

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web
• Security and Privacy: Privacy-enhancing technologies
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User privacy protection in personalized systems

Abstract

Privacy policies are long, complex, and rarely read, which limits their effectiveness in informed consent. We investigate scrollytelling, a scroll-driven narrative approach, as a privacy policy presentation format. We built a prototype that interleaves the full policy text with animated visuals to create a dynamic reading experience. In an online study (N=454), we compared our tool against text, two nutrition-label variants, and a standalone interactive visualization. Scrollytelling improved user experience over text, yielding higher engagement, lower cognitive load, greater willingness to adopt the format, and increased perceived clarity. It also matched other formats on comprehension accuracy and confidence, with only one nutrition-label variant performing slightly better. Changes in perceived understanding, transparency, and trust were small and statistically inconclusive. These findings suggest that scrollytelling can preserve comprehension while enhancing the experience of policy reading. We discuss design implications for accessible policy communication and identify directions for increasing transparency and user trust.

Problem

• privacy policies
• informed consent
• user engagement
• comprehension
• transparency

Innovation

• scrollytelling
• privacy policy
• interactive visualization
• user experience
• informed consent