Smart voice assistants such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home are becoming increasingly pervasive in our everyday environments. Despite their benefits, their miniaturized and embedded cameras and microphones raise important privacy concerns related to surveillance and eavesdropping. Recent work on the privacy concerns of people in the vicinity of these devices has highlighted the need for 'tangible privacy', where control and feedback mechanisms can provide a more assured sense of whether the camera or microphone is 'on' or 'off'. However, current designs of these devices lack adequate mechanisms to provide such assurances. To address this gap in the design of smart voice assistants, especially in the case of disabling microphones, we evaluate several designs that incorporate (or not) tangible control and feedback mechanisms. By comparing people's perceptions of risk, trust, reliability, usability, and control for these designs in a between-subjects online experiment (N=261), we find that devices with tangible built-in physical controls are perceived as more trustworthy and usable than those with non-tangible mechanisms. Our findings present an approach for tangible, assured privacy especially in the context of embedded microphones.
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Tangible Interactions for Privacy Management
Due to the ubiquity of IoT devices, privacy violations can now occur across our cyber-physical-social lives. An individual is often not aware of the possible privacy implications of their actions and commonly lacks the ability to dynamically control the undesired access to themselves or their information. Present approaches to privacy management lack an immediacy of feedback and action, tend to be complex and non-engaging, are intrusive and socially inappropriate, and are inconsistent with users' natural interactions with the physical and social environment. This results in ineffective end-user privacy management. To address these challenges, I focus on designing tangible systems, which promise to provide high levels of stimulation, rich feedback, direct, and engaging interaction experiences. This is achieved through intuitive awareness mechanisms and control interactions, conceptualizing interaction metaphors, implementing tangible interfaces for privacy management and demonstrating their utility within various real life scenarios.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1919375
- PAR ID:
- 10156505
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Thirteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI ’19).
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 723 to 726
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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