Modernizing User Privacy Preference Measurement through GPPI: A GDPR-aligned Privacy Preference Item Bank
For practitioners and researchers, this provides a validated tool to assess user preferences for GDPR mechanisms, addressing a gap left by existing privacy concern instruments.
This work develops a GDPR-grounded privacy preference measurement item bank (GPPI) with 527 items across 9 parent themes and 73 subthemes, achieving ~85% expert agreement, to enable measurement of user preferences for specific GDPR regulatory protections.
Privacy measurement instruments (e.g., CFIP, IUIPC, PAQ) predate GDPR by over a decade and measure privacy concerns, distinct from preferences for regulatory protections (e.g., data portability, erasure, automated decision-making rights). This leaves practitioners without tools to assess whether users value the GDPR mechanisms implemented in compliant policies. We developed a GDPR-grounded privacy preference measurement item bank by extracting 669 statements from all 99 GDPR articles, validated by: (1) two-round expert review achieving full consensus on accuracy, (2) semantic clustering into 10 parent themes and 87 subthemes, and (3) consensus review with 50 privacy experts (5 per theme) using a larger or equal than 4/5 vote retention threshold. The final 527-item bank comprises 9 parent themes and 73 subthemes (18 to 112 items per parent theme, 1 to 29 per subtheme), enabling targeted measurement across granularities while covering GDPR at mean pairwise expert agreement of approx. 85%. This work introduces a complementary measurement dimension aligning user preferences with regulatory mechanisms.