Privacy Icon Study

Hi all-

Related, but independent, to Sören's note, TRUSTe released its first study on privacy icons, which you can read about on our blog if you are interested:

http://www.truste.com/blog/?p=1172

<http://www.truste.com/blog/?p=1172>Please contact Travis (User Experience Designer) directly (cc:d) if you would like to interact or provide any feedback.

Thanks Sören for sharing, we will take a look at the latest version of the standard.

Kevin



On Feb 24, 2011, at 5:12 AM, Sören Preibusch wrote:

Several proposals of iconographic representations of privacy concepts have
been brought up by academia, industry and individual enthusiasts. Some of
these proposals were discussed at the Workshop and over this list.

The Unicode Standard, version 6.0 now introduces a plethora of over 750 new
symbols, emoticons, and pictographs, including characters for sunrise over
mountains (U+1F304), Bactrian camel (U+1F42B, "has two humps"),
extraterrestrial alien (U+1F47D), circus tent (U+1F3AA), face screaming in
fear (U+1F631), etc.

Two (printable) characters may be more relevant for us:

1F50F LOCK WITH INK PEN
= privacy
1F510 CLOSED LOCK WITH KEY
= secure

The subtext is the intended meaning. Visual representations can be found at
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-6.0/U60-1F300.pdf#page=10. As
pointed out by the Consortium, "the glyphs in [the] charts are only
representative; there can be wide variation in the glyphs used to represent
any particular character".

Whilst a single new character in this high range may not be interesting in
itself, the combining characters in the standard, such as U+20E0 (combining
enclosing circle backslash), can be added to express ideas such as "no
privacy" or "not secure".

Sören