Decide Yourself or Delegate - User Preferences Regarding the Autonomy of Personal Privacy Assistants in Private IoT-Equipped Environments

Karola Marky, Alina Stöver, Sarah Prange, Kira Bleck, Paul Gerber, Verena Zimmermann, Florian Müller, Florian Alt, Max Mühlhäuser

CHI 2024

Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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TL;DR

What we did: We conducted a series of studies to investigate user preferences regarding the autonomy of Personalized Privacy Assistants in Internet of Things-equipped environments, establishing a method for assigning users to privacy profiles based on their needs.

What we found: We found that while users with high privacy motivations preferred notification and recommendation types of Personal Privacy Assistants, they leaned towards fully autonomous systems when faced with a high volume of privacy decisions, indicating a trade-off between control and convenience.

Takeaway: Our findings suggest that designing scalable Personal Privacy Assistants should prioritize user control in low-decision environments while allowing for automation in situations with frequent decisions to enhance usability.

Abstract

Personalized privacy assistants (PPAs) communicate privacy-related decisions of their users to Internet of Things (IoT) devices. There are different ways to implement PPAs by varying the degree of autonomy or decision model. This paper investigates user perceptions of PPA autonomy models and privacy profiles – archetypes of individual privacy needs – as a basis for PPA decisions in private environments (e.g., a friend’s home). We first explore how privacy profiles can be assigned to users and propose an assignment method. Next, we investigate user perceptions in 18 usage scenarios with varying contexts, data types and number of decisions in a study with 1126 participants. We found considerable differences between the profiles in settings with few decisions. If the number of decisions gets high (> 1/h), participants exclusively preferred fully autonomous PPAs. Finally, we discuss implications and recommendations for designing scalable PPAs that serve as privacy interfaces for future IoT devices.

Abstract

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