Privacy policies govern how personal data is collected, used, and shared. Yet, in most privacy-policy consent flows, agreement is operationalized as a single click at the end of a long, opaque policy document. Recent privacy-law scholarship has argued for a standard of demonstrably informed consent. That is, the party drafting and designing privacy-policy consent mechanisms must generate reliable evidence that a person demonstrates comprehension of the consequential terms to which they agree. To this end, we study pedagogical friction as a design framing: minimal interventions embedded within a privacy-policy consent flow that aim to support demonstrated comprehension while keeping burden on the user low. In a randomized experiment, we tested pedagogical friction for demonstrably informed consent in the context of a privacy policy for an edtech app for young children. We recruited 293 parents of kids ages 3-8 to review the app's privacy policy under one of six conditions that varied presentation format and pacing, then complete a six-question comprehension quiz. Three conditions offered a second policy review and quiz retake for participants who did not pass this quiz on their first attempt. We find that the slide-based condition (G3) achieved the highest first-attempt threshold attainment (>=80%) (41.7%), followed by the paced, sectioned condition (G4) (30.6%). In the retake conditions, 64.9% of participants who completed a second attempt improved their score. Notably, in conditions that did not gate consent on demonstrated comprehension, 97.3% of participants who scored below the threshold still chose to consent, suggesting that ungated consent flows can record agreement without demonstrated comprehension. Our results suggest that pedagogical friction can strengthen the evidentiary basis of consent and clarify what it costs in time and burden.

翻译：隐私政策规定了个人数据的收集、使用和共享方式。然而，在大多数隐私政策同意流程中，同意被简化为在冗长且不透明的政策文档末尾点击一次按钮。近期隐私法学术研究提出应采用“可证实的知情同意”标准，即隐私政策同意机制的设计与起草方必须生成可靠证据，证明用户对所同意的关键条款已表现出理解。为此，我们基于“教学性摩擦”这一设计框架展开研究：在隐私政策同意流程中嵌入最小化干预措施，旨在支持用户展现理解能力，同时降低其操作负担。我们通过一项随机实验，以一款面向幼儿的教育科技应用隐私政策为场景，测试了教学性摩擦对实现可证实知情同意的效果。我们招募了293名3-8岁儿童的家长，要求他们在一至六种不同呈现格式与节奏的条件下审阅该应用的隐私政策，随后完成包含六个问题的理解测试。三项条件允许首次测试未通过的参与者进行二次政策审阅与测试重答。研究发现，幻灯片式条件（G3）的首轮达标率（≥80%）最高（41.7%），其次为分节分步条件（G4）（30.6%）。在允许重答的条件下，64.9%完成二次尝试的参与者成绩有所提升。值得注意的是，在未将展现理解作为同意前提条件的组别中，97.3%未达标参与者仍选择同意，表明无门槛的同意流程可能记录同意但缺乏对理解能力的验证。研究结果表明，教学性摩擦能够增强同意的证据基础，同时明确其在时间与操作负担方面的成本。