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1. Understanding People’s Attitude and Concerns towards Adopting IoT Devices

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3451633  

   Lafontaine, Evan; Sabir, Aafaq; Das, Anupam (May 2021, CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts)

   null (Ed.)

   The proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) has started transforming our lifestyle through automation of home appliances. However, there are users who are hesitant to adopt IoT devices due to various privacy and security concerns. In this paper, we elicit peoples’ attitude and concerns towards adopting IoT devices. We conduct an online survey and collect responses from 232 participants from three different geographic regions (United States, Europe, and India); the participants consist of both adopters and non-adopters of IoT devices. Through data analysis, we determine that there are both similarities and differences in perceptions and concerns between adopters and non-adopters. For example, even though IoT and non-IoT users share similar security and privacy concerns, IoT users are more comfortable using IoT devices in private settings compared to non-IoT users. Furthermore, when comparing users’ attitude and concerns across different geographic regions, we found similarities between participants from the US and Europe, yet participants from India showcased contrasting behavior. For instance, we found that participants from India were more trusting in their government to properly protect consumer data and were more comfortable using IoT devices in a variety of public settings, compared to participants from the US and Europe. Based on our findings, we provide recommendations to reduce users’ concerns in adopting IoT devices, and thereby enhance user trust towards adopting IoT devices. 

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2. Factors affecting farmer perceived challenges towards precision agriculture

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s11119-023-10048-2  

   Wang, Tong; Jin, Hailong; Sieverding, Heidi L. (December 2023, Precision Agriculture)

   Precision Agriculture (PA) manages field heterogeneities and enables informed site-specific management. While PA helps improve farming efficiency and profitability, challenges prior to and following PA adoption can prevent many farmers from widely using it. This paper aims to understand producers’ challenge perceptions using 1119 survey responses from U.S. Midwest farmers. The majority (59%) of respondents have adopted at least one PA technology, while the minority (14%) had not adopted any PA technologies. Cost (equipment and service fee), brand compatibility, and data privacy concerns topped other concerns from the average producer’s point of view. Among all producers, 60% regarded PA equipment and service fee as too high, followed by 50% who viewed brand compatibility and data privacy as their major concerns. Producers at more advanced adoption stage indicated reduced concerns in most categories. Yet, there were similar concerns towards data privacy issue regardless of the adoption status. Furthermore, brand compatibility issue is more of a concern for adopters than for non-adopters. Estimation results from partial proportional odds (PPO) models show that factors that frequently affect producers’ perceived challenges include adoption status, cropland acres, age, education, information sources, farming goals, soil characteristics, and region variables. Findings from this study can aid PA stakeholders in identifying target groups, tailoring future development, research, and outreach efforts, and ultimately promoting efficient PA usage on a broader scale. 

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3. Privacy as a Planned Behavior: Effects of Situational Factors on Privacy Perceptions and Plans

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3450613.3456829  

   Mehdy, A K; Ekstrand, Michael D.; Knijnenburg, Bart P.; Mehrpouyan, Hoda (June 2021, UMAP ’21, June 21–25, 2021, Utrecht, Netherlands © 2021 Association for Computing Machinery.)

   null (Ed.)

   To account for privacy perceptions and preferences in user models and develop personalized privacy systems, we need to understand how users make privacy decisions in various contexts. Existing studies of privacy perceptions and behavior focus on overall tendencies toward privacy, but few have examined the context-specific factors in privacy decision making. We conducted a survey on Mechanical Turk (N=401) based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to measure the way users’ perceptions of privacy factors and intent to disclose information are affected by three situational factors embodied hypothetical scenarios: information type, recipients’ role, and trust source. Results showed a positive relationship between subjective norms and perceived behavioral control, and between each of these and situational privacy attitude; all three constructs are significantly positively associated with intent to disclose. These findings also suggest that, situational factors predict participants’ privacy decisions through their influence on the TPB constructs. 

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4. Tangible Privacy for Smart Voice Assistants: Bystanders' Perceptions of Physical Device Controls

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3555089  

   Ahmad, Imtiaz; Akter, Taslima; Buher, Zachary; Farzan, Rosta; Kapadia, Apu; Lee, Adam J. (November 2022, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

   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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5. Assessing Google Search’s New Features in Supporting Credibility Judgments of Unknown Websites

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3576840.3578277  

   Wang, Ace; De Jesus Sanchez, Liz Maylin; Wintner, Anya; Zhu, Yuanxin; Mustafaraj, Eni (January 2023, Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval)

   This study assesses the awareness and perceived utility of two features Google Search introduced in February 2021: “About this result” and “More about this page”. Google stated that the goal of these features is to help users vet unfamiliar web domains (or sources). We investigated whether the features were sufficiently prominent to be detected by frequent users of Google Search, and their perceived utility for making credibility judgments of sources, in one-on-one user studies with 25 undergraduate college students, who identify as frequent users of Google Search. Our results indicate a lack of adoption or awareness of these features by our participants and neutral-positive perceptions of their utility in evaluating web sources. We also examined the perceived usefulness of nine other domain credibility signals collected from the W3C. 

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