Designing for Privacy in Smart Home Devices

Abstract

One-sixth of the 20 billion Internet of Things (IoT) devices connecting to the Internet are smart home devices (SHD) that provide home automation. These SHDs present privacy and security threats and vulnerabilities, but users have limited privacy features available to them. Those features available are difficult to locate and oftentimes unusable. Additionally, there is little insight about what SHD users care about in terms of privacy, what controls they need to manage their privacy, and how to design more usable privacy controls focused on users’ needs. To address this problem, I utilized human-computer interaction (HCI) methods and conducted seven studies involving users and non-users to study their privacy concerns, privacy control needs, and the design of privacy controls.

While studying privacy solutions, I empirically identified users’ privacy control needs and presented seven design factors and 32 sub-factors reflecting those privacy controls needs. Furthermore, I created an interactive prototype design of the identified data-related privacy controls and evaluated the design for usability and perceived information control involving users. Thus, this dissertation advances the knowledge in SHD usable privacy domain by identifying SHD risks, users concerns, and privacy control needs. In addition, this work helps researchers and designers develop usable privacy controls for smart home devices. The design and findings also help technologists develop better privacy control designs for IoT devices at large.