“I would have to evaluate their objections”: Privacy tensions between smart home device owners and incidental users

Abstract

Recent research and articles in popular press have raised concerns about the privacy risks that smart home devices can create for incidental users—people who encounter smart home devices that are owned, controlled, and configured by someone else. In this work, we present the results of a user-centered investigation that explores incidental users’ experiences and the tensions that arise between device owners and incidental users. We conducted five focus group sessions through which we identified specific contexts in which someone might encounter other people’s smart home devices and the main concerns device owners and incidental users have in such situations. We used these findings to inform the design of a survey instrument, which we deployed to a demographically representative sample of 386 adults in the United States. Through this survey, we can better understand which contexts and concerns are most bothersome and how often device owners are willing to accommodate incidental users’ privacy preferences. We found some surprising trends in terms of what people are most worried about and what actions they are willing to take. For example, while participants who did not own devices themselves were often uncomfortable imagining them in their own homes, they were not as concerned about being affected by such devices in homes that they entered as part of their jobs. Participants showed interest in privacy solutions that might have a technical implementation component, but also frequently envisioned an open dialogue between incidental users and device owners to negotiate privacy accommodations.

Teo

“…Recent work has identified the challenges due to the discrepancy between decision makers and device users [22,41,91], partially motivating the need for stakeholder privacy. Some of this work examines privacy issues from the perspective of bystanders [11,88] and incidental users [21]. TEO further expands the set of stakeholders and, more importantly, designs and implements a novel system to address several practical challenges such as flexible group ownership, preserving data ownership, and access control and revocation.…”

“…As pointed out by a growing body of research, these assumptions are not always consistent with the emerging ubiquity of smart devices in shared spaces. Passive bystanders may nonetheless be impacted by a smart device simply by, for example, visiting someone's home [11,88], or by incidental exposure in public areas [21]. A related but distinct scenario is illustrated by the presence of IoT devices in short-term rentals (e.g., Airbnb), where guests may wish to use whatever smart devices are in their units, but have concerns about the host's ability to invade their privacy [25,60].…”

Exploring the Privacy Concerns of Bystanders in Smart Homes from the Perspectives of Both Owners and Bystanders

“…Researchers in [16,32,34] considered the perspectives of owners and bystanders (hosts and guests in an Airbnb environment [1]). Mare et al aimed at understanding the typical devices that hosts use, devices that guests prefer to use, and reasons why guests would be comfortable with some devices [32].…”

“…Cobb et al defined contexts that would make users incidental (which is the same as our definition of by-standers), and studied what context and concerns were bothersome for bystanders [16]. Their study allowed owners and bystanders to answer all the questions from both perspectives.…”

How Well Do My Results Generalize Now? The External Validity of Online Privacy and Security Surveys

“…For example, how often they had had someone take over their social media or email account without their permission or how often they were asked to agree to a privacy policy. 17 papers (65.4%) included experience questions in their user survey [1, 6, 7, 19, 22, 26, 27, 30, 32-34, 47, 53, 56, 58, ) included belief questions in their user survey [1,7,19,25,30,33,34,53,65].…”