Tangible Privacy for Smart Voice Assistants: Bystanders’ Perceptions of Physical Device Controls

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DOI

Smart voice assistants such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home are becoming increasingly pervasive in our homes. Despite their benefits, their miniaturized and embedded sensors (such as cameras and microphones) raise serious privacy concerns related to surveillance and eavesdropping. Recent work on understanding users' privacy concerns around these devices has highlighted the need for 'tangible privacy' where control and feedback mechanisms can provide a more assured sense of privacy (as with camera lens covers). To address this gap in the design of IoT devices, especially in the case of disabling microphones, we evaluate several designs of smart voice assistants that incorporate (or not) tangible control and feedback mechanisms. By comparing user's perceptions of risk, trust, reliability, usability, and control for these designs in a between-subjects online experiment (N=261), we find that users considered devices with tangible built-in physical controls to be more trustworthy and usable than non-tangible mechanisms. Our findings present an approach for tangible, assured privacy especially in the context of embedded microphones.