Discovering Smart Home Internet of Things Privacy Norms Using Contextual Integrity
This addresses privacy concerns for smart home users by providing actionable recommendations for manufacturers, though it is incremental as it applies an existing framework to a new context.
The researchers tackled the problem of user privacy in smart home IoT devices by developing a survey method based on the Contextual Integrity framework to discover privacy norms at scale, surveying 1,731 American adults and measuring the acceptability of 3,840 information flows for $2,800 in under six hours.
The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices for consumer "smart" homes raises concerns about user privacy. We present a survey method based on the Contextual Integrity (CI) privacy framework that can quickly and efficiently discover privacy norms at scale. We apply the method to discover privacy norms in the smart home context, surveying 1,731 American adults on Amazon Mechanical Turk. For $2,800 and in less than six hours, we measured the acceptability of 3,840 information flows representing a combinatorial space of smart home devices sending consumer information to first and third-party recipients under various conditions. Our results provide actionable recommendations for IoT device manufacturers, including design best practices and instructions for adopting our method for further research.