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Title: Tangible Privacy for Smart Voice Assistants: Bystanders' Perceptions of Physical Device Controls
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.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1814866
PAR ID:
10498061
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
25th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work And Social Computing
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Volume:
6
Issue:
CSCW2
ISSN:
2573-0142
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 31
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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