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1. An Examination of People’s Privacy Concerns, Perceptions of Social Benefits, and Acceptance of COVID-19 Mitigation Measures That Harness Location Information: A Comparative Study of the U.S. and South Korea

   https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi10010025  

   Kim, Junghwan ; Kwan, Mei-Po ( January 2021 , ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information)

   null (Ed.)

   This paper examines people’s privacy concerns, perceptions of social benefits, and acceptance of various COVID-19 control measures that harness location information using data collected through an online survey in the U.S. and South Korea. The results indicate that people have higher privacy concerns for methods that use more sensitive and private information. The results also reveal that people’s perceptions of social benefits are low when their privacy concerns are high, indicating a trade-off relationship between privacy concerns and perceived social benefits. Moreover, the acceptance by South Koreans for most mitigation methods is significantly higher than that by people in the U.S. Lastly, the regression results indicate that South Koreans (compared to people in the U.S.) and people with a stronger collectivist orientation tend to have higher acceptance for the control measures because they have lower privacy concerns and perceive greater social benefits for the measures. These findings advance our understanding of the important role of geographic context and culture as well as people’s experiences of the mitigation measures applied to control a previous pandemic. 

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2. Social Distancing Compliance Monitoring for COVID-19 Recovery Through Footstep-Induced Floor Vibrations

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3485730.3492893  

   Dong, Yiwen ; Wu, Yuyan ; Noh, Hae Young ( November 2021 , SenSys '21: Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems)

   Monitoring the compliance of social distancing is critical for schools and offices to recover in-person operations in indoor spaces from the COVID-19 pandemic. Existing systems focus on vision- and wearable-based sensing approaches, which require direct line-of-sight or device-carrying and may also raise privacy concerns. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a new monitoring system for social distancing compliance based on footstep-induced floor vibration sensing. This system is device-free, non-intrusive, and perceived as more privacy-friendly. Our system leverages the insight that footsteps closer to the sensors generate vibration signals with larger amplitudes. The system first estimates the location of each person relative to the sensors based on signal energy and then infers the distance between two people. We evaluated the system through a real-world experiment with 8 people, and the system achieves an average accuracy of 97.8% for walking scenario classification and 80.4% in social distancing violation detection. 

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3. From Contextualizing to Context Theorizing: Assessing Context Effects in Privacy Research

   https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.4249  

   Xu, Heng ; Zhang, Nan ( October 2022 , Management Science)

   Over the past two decades, behavioral research in privacy has made considerable progress transitioning from acontextual studies to using contextualization as a powerful sensitizing device for illuminating the boundary conditions of privacy theories. Significant challenges and opportunities wait, however, on elevating and converging individually contextualized studies to a context-contingent theory that explicates the mechanisms through which contexts influence consumers’ privacy concerns and their behavioral reactions. This paper identifies the important barriers occasioned by this lack of context theorizing on the generalizability of privacy research findings and argues for accelerating the transition from the contextualization of individual research studies to an integrative understanding of context effects on privacy concerns. It also takes a first step toward this goal by providing a conceptual framework and the associated methodological instantiation for assessing how context-oriented nuances influence privacy concerns. Empirical evidence demonstrates the value of the framework as a diagnostic device guiding the selection of contextual contingencies in future research, so as to advance the pace of convergence toward context-contingent theories in information privacy. This paper was accepted by Anindya Ghose, information systems. 

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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. 3D Privacy Framework: The Citizen Value Driven Privacy Framework

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ISC253183.2021.9562841  

   Mimo, Edgard Musafiri ; McDaniel, Troy ( September 2021 , 2021 IEEE International Smart Cities Conference (ISC2))

   The promises of smart cities continue to overwhelm many people eager to live in them. Simultaneously, many people are still concerned about the increasing privacy risks associated with the core of the promises. The core of smart cities’ promises lies in generating and using data to enable urban technologies that provide, to some degree, value-added services and opportunities for both cities and their citizens. The promises of smart cities highlight three interdependent dimensions, namely the information type, purpose, and value that provide the basis of studying and addressing privacy concerns to enable successful smart cities. This paper presents a 3D privacy framework based on three interdependent dimensions that build on existing citizens’ privacy models [1] and framework [2] to hypothesize when citizens are likely to accept smart city technologies with privacy concerns, when citizens are more likely to accept trading their privacy for the provided valued services under defined regulations, and when citizens are likely to protest and disregard smart cities technologies altogether. The 3D privacy framework highlights new ways of evaluating how technologies impact citizens’ privacy and encourages adopting new ways to lessen citizens’ privacy concerns by implementing technology-specific agile regulation based on the metrics of security. Some specific examples of smart city technologies are discussed to illustrate the practicality and usefulness of the proposed 3D privacy framework in the smart cities’ space. 

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