In the past few months I’ve been building more and more dashboards for clients. The idea of collecting personal data however always raises questions about privacy. To solve this, I’ve been developing a way to implement gradual privacy.

Gradual privacy is a way to let the end-user decide who can see what data. The best way to explain, is just to show it:

The columns are the kind of data. And the rows are the parties you could share with. Naturally you would want to see all data, so ‘personal’ is checked by default. In the case of one dashboard, you can share data within the organization, the company doctor and scientific research. The next option could even be sharing it publicly.

Having control over the data gives back, control to the user. In my case this might make a difference in the amount of users for the dashboard. For starters, all the dashboards I develop are always based on opt-in.

These kind of settings however are complex for a user to decide, one solution would be much templates. Also note this doesn’t take into account where the data is saved. In the case of the dashboard, the data is saved on the server that isn’t owned by any clients.

As I’m working with quite sensitive personal data within my dashboards, this is one of the possible solutions for safeguarding privacy. If you have any other ideas around this, please leave a comment below!