Our consent agent is a free extension that you install in your browser. You can pre-set your consent settings (I agree, I do not agree) for different purposes that websites would collect your data for. The moment you visit a website, your consent agent automatically sends your pre-settings to the website. This means that you don’t have to click on any consent banner anymore.
You may adjust your preferences to the website you visit via our handover notice. This small and user-friendly substitute for banners appears at the bottom left of the website and automatically vanishes after a few seconds if you do not interact with it. Through this mechanism, the handover notice does not interfere with your user experience of the website. In the dashboard of your consent agent, you can keep track of all consent given and change any settings afterwards.
With our consent agent, we help you understand what your consent means for you personally by explaining the benefits and risks. This explanation is based on an exchange process with numerous international data protection experts and contains the following elements:
Firstly, we explain to you in clear language and through intuitive designs, the purposes for which each website and other service providers would like to process your data. These purposes are typically:
– Improve the website that you are visiting
– Enable additional website features (for example map services, videos)
– Customise the website to your interests
– Personalise advertising
Each of these purposes, to which you can consent individually, comes with different benefits and risks. For example, your consent to the improvement of the website helps to improve the user experience of the website (benefit); this is offset by the risk that the website will monitor your usage behaviour on the website and thus gain insights into your private life. However, this risk is low because your usage data is only used statistically, together with the data of many other users. The website provider therefore does not know what you have done as an individual on its website, but only what all users collectively do on average. These benefits and risks are the second important element of our intuitive designs.
It is important to clarify that the classification of the risks and benefits of various purposes is not assigned lightly. Rather, the categorisation is based on empirical research, together with data protection experts. To do this, we first carried out an extensive research process to empirically determine the risks that consumers see in the processing of their data. With the help of data protection experts, we then assigned these risk categories to the different purposes and weighed them against the corresponding benefits. In this way, we ensure that no risks are concealed or overlooked, but also that they are not exaggerated.
On this basis, we continuously develop an easy-to-understand visual representation of these purposes, benefits and risks as well as all other legally required information. To this aim, we create various prototypes and test them using empirical methods, primarily qualitative user tests until we have the most satisfactory result possible. Qualitative user tests give us very good insights into how users understand and use our designs and why the designs do not yet function optimally. However, such results are not yet statistically representative of the entire population. That's why we finally carry out quantitative representative A/B tests. Such A/B tests enable us to compare our different prototypes and find out which is the most effective one. The most effective design is the so-called State of the Art that we use as our new standard design (and which according to the law all website and service providers must take into account, see Art. 25 sect. 1 GDPR). We carry out this development and testing of our prototypes on an ongoing basis so that we can publish improved (more comprehensible) designs at frequent intervals. In this way, we can constantly raise the level of good consent designs.
This is how we explain your benefits and risks in relation to the various purposes for which the website or other service providers may wish to process your data. On this basis, we hope that you can decide for yourself whether the benefit is worth the corresponding risk and thus make real privacy decisions.
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