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Smart home cameras present new challenges for understanding behaviors and relationships surrounding always-on, domestic recording systems. We designed a series of discursive activities involving 16 individuals from ten households for six weeks in their everyday settings. These activities functioned as speculative probes prompting participants to reflect on themes of privacy and power through filming with cameras in their households. Our research design foregrounded critical-playful enactments that allowed participants to speculate potentials for relationships with cameras in the home beyond everyday use. We present four key dynamics with participants and home cameras by examining their relationships to: the camera’s eye, filming, their data, and camera’s societal contexts. We contribute discussions about the mundane, information privacy, and post-hoc reflection with one’s camera footage. Overall, our findings reveal the camera as a strange, yet banal entity in the home—interrogating how participants compose and handle their own and others’ video data.
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Balancing Power Dynamics in Smart Homes: Nannies' Perspectives on How Cameras Reflect and Affect Relationships
Smart home cameras raise privacy concerns in part because they frequently collect data not only about the primary users who deployed them but also other parties -- who may be targets of intentional surveillance or incidental bystanders. Domestic employees working in smart homes must navigate a complex situation that blends privacy and social norms for homes, workplaces, and caregiving. This paper presents findings from 25 semi-structured interviews with domestic childcare workers in the U.S. about smart home cameras, focusing on how privacy considerations interact with the dynamics of their employer-employee relationships. We show how participants’ views on camera data collection, and their desire and ability to set conditions on data use and sharing, were affected by power differentials and norms about who should control information flows in a given context. Participants’ attitudes about employers’ cameras often hinged on how employers used the data; whether participants viewed camera use as likely to reinforce negative tendencies in the employer-employee relationship; and how camera use and disclosure might reflect existing relationship tendencies. We also suggest technical and social interventions to mitigate the adverse effects of power imbalances on domestic employees’ privacy and individual agency.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2114229
- PAR ID:
- 10425606
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Eighteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2022)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 687-706
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
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- The DOI is not currently available.
