Heuristics for Assessing the Effective Control of Personal Data by Mobile Applications' Users

The goal of this paper is to present a new set of seven heuristics to overcome limitations of existing sets of privacy heuristics in terms of personal-data control activity. These heuristics have been operationalized into sixty-five more specific heuristics to reflect personal-data control activity and its various dimensions and to assess effective control of personal data. Heuristics were tested, being applied to a mobile application called “PadDoc” that allows users to store and transfer their personal data in the context of secured administrative or commercial transactions.