Tracing Personal Data Using Comics

Abstract

Personal health data is acquired, processed, stored, and accessed using a variety of different devices, apps, and services. These are often complex and highly connected. Therefore, privacy violations and other use or misuse of the data are hard to detect for many people, because they are not able to understand the trace (i.e., the provenance) of that data. We present a visualization technique for personal health data provenance using comics strips. Each strip of the comic represents a certain activity, such as entering data using an app, storing or retrieving data on a cloud service, or generating a diagram from the data. The comic strips are generated automatically using recorded provenance graphs. The easy-to-understand comics enable all people to realize crucial points regarding their data.