Framing Effects on Privacy Concerns about a Home Telepresence Robot
This research addresses privacy concerns for users of home telepresence robots, highlighting an incremental effect of framing on judgment replication and generalization in HRI.
The study investigated how contextual framing affects privacy judgments for home telepresence robots, finding a large effect when manipulating the robot operator's identity between a stranger and a close confidante, with this effect persisting across multiple videos.
Privacy-sensitive robotics is an emerging area of HRI research. Judgments about privacy would seem to be context-dependent, but none of the promising work on contextual "frames" has focused on privacy concerns. This work studies the impact of contextual "frames" on local users' privacy judgments in a home telepresence setting. Our methodology consists of using an online questionnaire to collect responses to animated videos of a telepresence robot after framing people with an introductory paragraph. The results of four studies indicate a large effect of manipulating the robot operator's identity between a stranger and a close confidante. It also appears that this framing effect persists throughout several videos. These findings serve to caution HRI researchers that a change in frame could cause their results to fail to replicate or generalize. We also recommend that robots be designed to encourage or discourage certain frames.