Making Privacy Graspable: Can we Nudge Users to use Privacy Enhancing Techniques?
This addresses privacy risks for smart speaker users by making controls more intuitive, though it is an incremental improvement over existing mute buttons.
The paper tackles the problem of underused privacy controls in smart speakers by introducing the Privacy Hat, a tangible device that physically covers the speaker to prevent listening, with preliminary results suggesting it may nudge users toward more active privacy protection.
Smart speakers are gaining popularity. However, such devices can put the user's privacy at risk whenever hot-words are misinterpreted and voice data is recorded without the user's consent. To mitigate such risks, smart speakers provide privacy control mechanisms like the build-in mute button. Unfortunately, previous work indicated that such mute buttons are rarely used. In this paper, we present the Privacy Hat, a tangible device which can be placed on the smart speaker to prevent the device from listening. We designed the Privacy Hat based on the results of a focus group and developed a working prototype. We hypothesize that the specific user experience of this physical and tangible token makes the use of privacy-enhancing technology more graspable for the user. As a consequence, we expect that the Privacy Hat nudges users to more actively use privacy-enhancing features like the mute button. In addition, we propose the Privacy Hat as a study tool as we hypothesize that the artifact supports participants in reflecting their behaviour. We report on the concept, the prototype and our preliminary results.