A survey-based exploration of users’ awareness and their willingness to protect their data with smart objects

Abstract

In the last years, the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart objects have become more and more popular in our everyday lives. While IoT contributes in making our everyday life more comfortable and easier, it also increases the threats to our privacy, as embedded sensors collect data about us and our environment. To foster the acceptance of IoT, privacy-preserving solutions are therefore necessary. While such solutions have already been proposed, most of them do not involve the users in their design. In this paper, we therefore adopt a user-centric approach and lay the ground for the future design of user-centric privacy-preserving solutions dedicated to smart home environments. To this end, we have designed and distributed a questionnaire fulfilled by 229 anonymous participants. Our objectives are two-fold: We aim at investigating (1) requirements for end user-involved privacy-preserving solutions and (2) users’ readiness to be involved in their own privacy protection. Our results show that the majority of our participants are aware of the data collection happening as well as the associated privacy risks and would be ready to control and audit the collected data.