Privacy framework for context-aware robot development

Abstract

Privacy is an essential topic in (social) robotics and becomes even more important when considering interactive and autonomous robots within the domestic environment. Robots will collect a lot of personal and sensitive information about the users and their environment. Thereby, privacy does consider the topic of (cyber-)security and the protection of information against misuse by involved service providers. So far, the main focus relies on theoretical concepts to propose privacy principles for robots. This article provides a privacy framework as a feasible approach to consider security and privacy issues as a basis. Thereby, the proposed privacy framework is put in the context of a user-centered design approach to highlight the correlation between the design process steps and the steps of the privacy framework. Furthermore, this article introduces feasible privacy methodologies for privacy-enhancing development to simplify the risk assessment and meet the privacy principles. Even though user participation plays an essential role in robot development, this is not the focus of this article. Even though user participation plays an essential role in robot development, this is not the focus of this article. The employed privacy methodologies are showcased in a use case of a robot as an interaction partner contrasting two different use case scenarios to encourage the importance of context awareness.