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Cameras are everywhere, and are increasingly coupled with video analytics software that can identify our face, track our mood, recognize what we are doing, and more. We present the results of a 10-day in-situ study designed to understand how people feel about these capabilities, looking both at the extent to which they expect to encounter them as part of their everyday activities and at how comfortable they are with the presence of such technologies across a range of realistic scenarios. Results indicate that while some widespread deployments are expected by many (e.g., surveillance in public spaces), others are not, with some making people feel particularly uncomfortable. Our results further show that individuals’ privacy preferences and expectations are complicated and vary with a number of factors such as the purpose for which footage is captured and analyzed, the particular venue where it is captured, and whom it is shared with. Finally, we discuss the implications of people’s rich and diverse preferences on opt-in or opt-out rights for the collection and use (including sharing) of data associated with these video analytics scenarios as mandated by regulations. Because of the user burden associated with the large number of privacy decisions people could be faced with, we discuss how new types of privacy assistants could possibly be configured to help people manage these decisions. 

Increasingly, icons are being proposed to concisely convey privacyrelated information and choices to users. However, complex privacy concepts can be difcult to communicate. We investigate which icons efectively signal the presence of privacy choices. In a series of user studies, we designed and evaluated icons and accompanying textual descriptions (link texts) conveying choice, opting-out, and sale of personal information — the latter an opt-out mandated by the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). We identifed icon-link text pairings that conveyed the presence of privacy choices without creating misconceptions, with a blue stylized toggle icon paired with “Privacy Options” performing best. The two CCPA-mandated link texts (“Do Not Sell My Personal Information” and “Do Not Sell My Info”) accurately communicated the presence of do-notsell opt-outs with most icons. Our results provide insights for the design of privacy choice indicators and highlight the necessity of incorporating user testing into policy making.