Congratulations! Our paper “Amazon vs. My Brother: How Users of Shared Smart Speakers Perceive and Cope with Privacy Risks” (top 5% of submissions) has received an Honourable Mention award at CHI 2020.
With the rapid adoption of smart speakers in people’s homes, there is a corresponding increase in users’ privacy and security concerns. In contrast to previous studies of users’ concerns about smart speakers’ divulging private information to their manufacturers, our study focused on investigating users’ concerns with regard to housemates and external entities. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 26 participants liv- ing in 21 households. Our results suggest that users often have an inadequate understanding of what data their smart speakers makes available to all users and what is kept private. Although participants expressed different privacy concerns about their housemates and external entities, they adopted similar, yet suboptimal, risk management strategies. We provide recommendations for future speaker design to support more optimal coping with the perceived risks. For more details, please check the paper.
With the rapid adoption of smart speakers in people’s homes, there is a corresponding increase in users’ privacy and security concerns. In contrast to previous studies of users’ concerns about smart speakers’ divulging private information to their manufacturers, we conducted a study to investigate users’ concerns with regard to housemates and external entities. To illustrate, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 26 participants living in 21 households.
The number of smartphone users worldwide was expected to surpass 2 billion in 2016. To protect personal and other sensitive information from unauthorized access, some smartphone users lock their phones. Yet, others don’t, risking the data and online services accessible through their devices. The risks emanate from both device thieves and those whobelong to the users’ social circles, so called social insiders. In 2014, 2.1 million Americans (under 2%) had phones stolen. 
Current smartphone operating systems regulate application permissions by prompting users on an ask-on-first-use basis. Prior research has shown that this method is ineffective because it fails to account for context: the circumstances under which an application first requests access to data may be vastly different than the circumstances under which it subsequently requests access. 