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Many households include children who use voice personal assistants (VPA) such as Amazon Alexa. Children benefit from the rich functionalities of VPAs and third-party apps but are also exposed to new risks in the VPA ecosystem. In this article, we first investigate “risky” child-directed voice apps that contain inappropriate content or ask for personal information through voice interactions. We build SkillBot—a natural language processing-based system to automatically interact with VPA apps and analyze the resulting conversations. We find 28 risky child-directed apps and maintain a growing dataset of 31,966 non-overlapping app behaviors collected from 3,434 Alexa apps. Our findings suggest that although child-directed VPA apps are subject to stricter policy requirements and more intensive vetting, children remain vulnerable to inappropriate content and privacy violations. We then conduct a user study showing that parents are concerned about the identified risky apps. Many parents do not believe that these apps are available and designed for families/kids, although these apps are actually published in Amazon’s “Kids” product category. We also find that parents often neglect basic precautions, such as enabling parental controls on Alexa devices. Finally, we identify a novel risk in the VPA ecosystem: confounding utterances or voice commands shared by multiple apps that may cause a user to interact with a different app than intended. We identify 4,487 confounding utterances, including 581 shared by child-directed and non-child-directed apps. We find that 27% of these confounding utterances prioritize invoking a non-child-directed app over a child-directed app. This indicates that children are at real risk of accidentally invoking non-child-directed apps due to confounding utterances.
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Effects of Privacy Permissions on User Choices in Voice Assistant App Stores
Intelligent voice assistants, and the thirdparty apps (aka “skills” or “actions”) that power them, are increasing in popularity and beginning to experiment with the ability to continuously listen to users. This paper studies how privacy concerns related to such always-listening voice assistants might affect consumer behavior and whether certain privacy mitigations would render them more acceptable. To explore these questions with more realistic user choices, we built an interactive app store that allowed users to install apps for a hypothetical always-listening voice assistant. In a study with 214 participants, we asked users to browse the app store and install apps for different voice assistants that offered varying levels of privacy protections. We found that users were generally more willing to install continuously-listening apps when there were greater privacy protections, but this effect was not universally present. The majority did not review any permissions in detail, but still expressed a preference for stronger privacy protections. Our results suggest that privacy factors into user choice, but many people choose to skip this information.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1801501
- PAR ID:
- 10353642
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies
- Volume:
- 2022
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 2299-0984
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 421 to 439
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.56553/popets-2022-0116
