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‘Privicons’ Signal E-mail Privacy Expectations

December 20, 2011

According to PC World, a team of privacy researchers and product designers from Europe and the United States has developed a browser-based product that provides users with a simple way of noting their privacy expectations for their e-mail.

The article outlined the project and noted that the Privicons project stands apart from other e-mail privacy efforts because it relies on user choice instead of technological enforcement. According to the article, Privicons are a set of icons with short descriptions that can be attached to e-mail to instruct recipients about how to handle the message.

The six icons instruct the recipient to: share, don’t attribute (keep author anonymous), keep private, keep internal, don’t print, and delete after reading, can be used in both HTML and text-only formats.

According to the article, the first implementation of the project consists of a browser extension for Google Chrome that works with Gmail. When the Chrome extension is installed, the option to add Privicons will be available on the Gmail window for composing messages.

PC World noted that developers who create e-mail user agents are instructed in an Internet draft submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force to provide the option of overruling Privicons if they choose to implement the standard.

"Privicons embraces the concept of code-based norms approach," the developers said. "The approach is grounded in reminder over hard-coded solutions that indiscriminately restrict speech."

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