The principle of “informed consent” as prescribed by national laws and EU directives makes it necessary to inform users about all the intended data processing when they submit data. Conveying the sometimes highly complex clauses of privacy policies to the subjects concerned is generally hard.

This report takes a look at the icons appearing in Annex to Article 13a of the European Parliament legislative resolution of 12 March 2014 on the Proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on the protection of individual with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data (General Data Protection Regulation).  COM (2012) 11.

In particular, the report presents the result of a small-scale test in which the participants failed to understand the graphic scheme of the proposal as well as the pictographic parts of the icons.