Eliciting Privacy Concerns for Smart Home Devices from a User Centered Perspective

Abstract

Smart homes are equipped with an ecosystem of devices that support humans in their everyday activities, ranging from entertainment, lighting and security systems. Although smart devices provide home automation features that are convenient, comfortable, and easy to control, they also pose critical privacy risks for users, especially considering their continuous ability to sense users’ information and connect to web services. To elicit privacy concerns from a user-centric perspective, the authors performed a thorough analysis of 128 online reviews of consumers of smart home hubs – including Amazon Echo, Google Home, Wink and Insteon. The reviews expressed users’ concerns about privacy. The reviews were coded and classified according to four information security principles and temporal dimensions ranging from data collection to information sharing. A discussion on how to improve the design of smart home devices with privacy-enhanced solutions is provided.