The municipality of Utrecht has been nominated for the Privacy Awards 2025 with its initiative to make municipal privacy policies accessible to all residents. Together with specialists such as design agency Patroon Legal Design and law firm De Roos, the municipality of Utrecht was able to communicate more clearly on its website to its residents what data the municipality processes about them and for what purposes. In this interview, Yvonne Staal, Chief Privacy Officer at the Utrecht municipality, and Savannah Koomen, Legal Designer at Patroon, talk about their innovative approach to transforming complex privacy jargon into understandable language and images.
The idea came about when Staal discovered during a visit to law students at Utrecht University that even they had difficulty understanding their municipality's privacy statement. "If law students already do not understand what we are doing based on the information we present, then we are not doing something right," says Staal. This was a major reason for her to take a hard look at the municipality's privacy statement.
The municipality worked with law firm De Roos and design firm Pattern to make the information accessible. "We used our skills in legal knowledge and design to make legal information understandable, accessible and, above all, user-friendly," Koomen explained. The team selected the 90 most important processes that residents have to deal with out of about 300 processing steps.
The processes are made understandable using infographics and images that clarify what data is processed by the municipality and what happens to it. Koomen: "What does someone actually want to know when someone reads a privacy policy? Questions such as: What data is being processed about me? What happens to that data?" Language was also critically examined. "We tried to use B1 level throughout," says Staal. "A term like 'automated decision-making,' which is pretty essential in the AVG, no human being on the street understands."
A concrete example of the innovative approach is the way "tax parking enforcement" is explained. "To the citizen, of course, that's just: I parked and I have to pay," says Koomen. "That conversion from official language to something the citizen understands, that's really the core of what we've always done."
This initiative can serve as an example for other municipalities. "Any municipality could in principle copy what we have created if they make the same translation as we did," states Staal. The basics of municipal tasks are similar everywhere, making it easy to replicate the setup.
For specialists and people who want to know more about privacy policies, the full processing register will remain available. "But we wanted to go the extra mile for those people who are not used to legal language," Staal stressed.
With this initiative, the municipality of Utrecht demonstrates that it is possible to meet the transparency requirements of the AVG in a way that is understandable to all residents. The nomination for the Privacy Awards 2025 underlines the innovative nature of this approach.
