Physically-intuitive Privacy and Security: A Design Paradigm for Building User Trust in Smart Sensing Environments
This addresses privacy and security concerns for users of sensor-based interactive systems like smart speakers and webcams, offering a novel design approach rather than incremental improvements.
The paper tackles the problem of user mistrust in smart sensing environments due to privacy risks by proposing a new design paradigm called physically-intuitive privacy and security (PIPS), which uses physics-based controls to improve trust, as demonstrated in case studies showing enhanced trust compared to existing systems.
Sensor-based interactive systems -- e.g., "smart" speakers, webcams, and RFID tags -- allow us to embed computational functionality into physical environments. They also expose users to real and perceived privacy risks: users know that device manufacturers, app developers, and malicious third parties want to collect and monetize their personal data, which fuels their mistrust of these systems even in the presence of privacy and security controls. We propose a new design paradigm, physically-intuitive privacy and security (PIPS), which aims to improve user trust by designing privacy and security controls that provide users with simple, physics-based conceptual models of their operation. PIPS consists of three principles: (1) direct physical manipulation of sensor state; (2) perceptible assurance of sensor state; and, (3) intent-aligned sensor (de)activation. We illustrate these principles through three case studies -- Smart Webcam Cover, Powering for Privacy, and On-demand RFID -- each of which has been shown to improve trust relative to existing sensor-based systems.