Olivier Glassey and Jean‐Henry Morin
receives a personal answer or recommendation by the commissioners. In six months we published a dozen new scenarios and we even created a new stakeholder category, namely citizens. Indeed we received many requests on data protection and transparency regarding citizens’ everyday life. This led to extending our scope, even though it was initially limited to organizations.
5. Assessment of ThinkData. ch
The initial goal of ThinkData. ch was to bridge the gap between legal complexity and end‐users’ understanding of data protection and transparency requirements. In order to do so we used the body of research on user satisfaction, most notably Wixon and Todd ' s paper( 2005). They propose“ an integrated research model that distinguishes beliefs and attitudes about the system from beliefs and attitudes about using the system”. To survey the behaviour of using technology Wixon and Todd rely on the well‐known technology acceptance model( TAM) developed by Davis( 1989). This theory suggests that users confronted to a new technology are influenced in their use by the:
• Perceived usefulness: Davis defines it as“ the degree to which a person believes that using a particular system would enhance his or her job performance”;
• Perceived ease‐of‐use: Davis describes this as“ the degree to which a person believes that using a particular system would be free from effort”.
We have not yet investigated these questions methodically, e. g. with an online survey for ThinkData. ch users or with interviews. However we had feedback on how the service is used:
• As an FAQ screening tool for organizations on data protection and transparency: some people reported using the service in their organizations to direct their employees to get more familiar with data protection and transparency issues and to first check there for any related questions before asking the person in charge in the organization.
• As a training tool in education and awareness training on data protection and transparency: as part of the public administration training in Geneva, ThinkData is used within a course on data protection and transparency provided to state employees( State of Geneva Continuous Education programs 2012).
• As a way to alert or warn on a potential data protection and transparency issue: some people have reported using the print your story takeaway feature of ThinkData to actually give it to their managers or simply leave it on a table somewhere so other people can be alerted.
• Personal verification use: many people reported using the service to check on how their personal information are used and as a way to make sure that they are doing the right thing in potential data protection and transparency situations.
This gives us a few elements of response regarding perceived usefulness( service recommended to employees and used in training) and perceived ease‐of‐use( print a story and show it around). Of course this is only very preliminary and not based on scientific evidence. Future work will be the realization of an online questionnaire that ThinkData. ch visitors will be asked to fill when accessing the website.
Furthermore we wanted to assess the usability of ThinkData. ch, by measuring attributes of electronic services such as accessibility, timeliness, personalization, navigation or online facilities. In order to do so we used an assessment framework we developed in order to measure the“ proximity” of e‐Government services( Glassey & Glassey 2004). The unit of measure used in this assessment is the Smallest Number of Clicks( SNC) to reach a given element of measure( Table 1).
The version 2 of ThinkData. ch has all of these features available in one‐click( or at the most two), apart from personalisation. This topic leads us to our next section, as we would need to develop a multi‐jurisdictional model for ThinkData. ch in order to be able to give personal recommendations to users according to their localization( Federal laws in Switzerland are completed by Cantonal laws, and in some cases the Cantonal law is more restrictive that the Federal one, e. g. in the case of data protection).
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