Security and privacy awareness in smart environments – a cross-country investigation

Abstract

Smart environments are becoming ubiquitous despite many potential security and privacy issues. But, do people understand what consequences could arise from using smart environments? To answer this research question, we conducted a survey with 575 participants from three different countries (Germany, Spain, Romania) considering smart home and health environments. Less than half of all participants mentioned at least one security and privacy issue, with significantly more German participants mentioning issues than the Spanish ones and the Spanish participants in turn mentioning significantly more security and privacy issues than the Romanian participants. Using open coding, we find that among the 275 participants mentioning security and privacy issues, 111 only expressed abstract concerns such as “security issues” and only 34 mentioned concrete harms such as “Burglaries (physical and privacy)”, caused by security and privacy violations. The remaining 130 participants who mentioned security and privacy issues named only threats (i.e. their responses were more concrete than just abstract concerns but they did not mention concrete harming scenarios).