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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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PowerCut and Obfuscator: An Exploration of the Design Space for Privacy-Preserving Interventions for Smart Speakers
The pervasive use of smart speakers has raised numerous privacy concerns. While work to date provides an understanding of user perceptions of these threats, limited research focuses on how we can mitigate these concerns, either through redesigning the smart speaker or through dedicated privacy-preserving interventions. In this paper, we present the design and prototyping of two privacy-preserving interventions: 'Obfuscator' targeted at disabling recording at the microphones, and 'PowerCut' targeted at disabling power to the smart speaker. We present our findings from a technology probe study involving 24 households that interacted with our prototypes; the primary objective was to gain a better understanding of the design space for technological interventions that might address these concerns. Our data and findings reveal complex trade-offs among utility, privacy, and usability and stresses the importance of multi-functionality, aesthetics, ease-of-use, and form factor. We discuss the implications of our findings for the development of subsequent interventions and the future design of smart speakers.
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- PAR ID:
- 10299750
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Seventeenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2021)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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