How to Increase Smart Home Security and Privacy Risk Perception

Abstract

With continuous technological advancements, our homes become smarter by interconnecting more and more devices. Smart homes provide many advantages. However, they also introduce new privacy and security risks. Recent studies show that only a few people are aware of abstract risks, and most people are not aware of specific negative consequences. We developed a privacy and security awareness intervention for people who want to inform themselves about risks in the smart home context. Our intervention is based on research literature on risk perception and feedback from both lay users and security and privacy experts. We evaluated our intervention regarding its influence on participants' perceived threat, privacy attitude, motivation to avoid threats, willingness to pay, and time commitment to configure protective measures. The results of this evaluation show a significant increase for all these aspects. We also compared our intervention to information that users could obtain during an Internet search on the topic. In this comparison, our intervention evokes a significantly higher perceived threat and privacy attitude. It showed no significant difference for the other three scales. We discuss our findings in light of related work.

Privacy Risk Assessment of Smart Home System Based on a STPA–FMEA Method

“…Joseph [ 4 ] used the PRASH framework to analyse smart home privacy risks, but the risk scenarios identified and evaluated by the study were mainly due to cyber attacks. Reyhan [ 37 ] proposed measures to control privacy risks from the perspective of human factors only. In contrast, this study analyses human factors, environmental effects, component defects, and the privacy risks resulting from the interaction of the three.…”

Integrating Human Factors in the Visualisation of Usable Transparency for Dynamic Risk Assessment

“…For this purpose, we proposed and developed a decision tree concept and three types of awareness preferences (outlined in Sections 6 and 7, respectively). While the provided solution was refined through four iterations and proved to be successful during the project deployments, the inadvertent limitation by the published works on the user studies should be noted for future research [16][17][18], as they were conducted mainly in Germany and their samples were likely to be biased due to the usage of an online recruitment panel. With our proposed solution, we provide the means to address the security and privacy perception of each individual user while preserving a high level of security through balancing the automation and security preferences.…”

“…More specifically, they evaluated the differences between perception of the abstract and specific risk scenarios related to cyber risks. A proposition of the design of a risk perception intervention to raise the security and privacy threats attitude, specifically in the smart home environment, was advanced in the follow-up work [18]. Their proposed intervention targets vision enhancement for the smart home as a whole.…”

“…Another noteworthy part of the research inputs are the usability studies [16][17][18] performed to investigate how to optimally bring security-and privacy-related information, which tends to be technical in nature, to the lay users. These studies focus on the perception of the user towards cybersecurity and privacy risks.…”

An Overview of Privacy Dimensions on the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)

“…While leaders in industries like manufacturing or heavy industry may not prioritize data privacy as highly as other sectors, the digital age is changing this perspective. Data privacy has become a significant risk for any industry that deals with potentially sensitive data concerning customers, employees, and business partners [66].…”