New SPLICE Publication: Contextualizing Interpersonal Data Sharing in Smart Homes

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tinapavlovich

May 13, 2024

When multiple people share a smart home—whether as residents, landlords, or guests—equal access to smart-home data may raise privacy concerns, and blocking everyone’s access to the data is not practical. Adding finer-grained access control to balance utility and privacy needs can be a burdensome process for users. Built on the framework of Contextual Integrity, this paper aims to inform a more efficient and effective design of data-sharing mechanisms for smart-home devices by streamlining user’s preferences for data sharing in smart homes and prioritizing certain contexts during the approval process.

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The proportion of participants who switched from “Comfortable/Somewhat comfortable” to “Uncomfortable/Somewhat uncomfortable” when we added more context to the original question about their comfort in sharing a particular type of data with a certain person. The contexts are listed on the y-axis of all the heatmaps, and the number in the cells denotes the proportion of people who switched from “Comfortable/Somewhat comfortable” to “Uncomfortable/Somewhat uncomfortable”. The darker the color, the more participants changed their opinion after seeing the contextual factors listed on the y-axis.

He, Weijia, Nathan Reitinger, Atheer Almogbil, Yi-Shyuan Chiang, Timothy J. Pierson, and David Kotz. “Contextualizing Interpersonal Data Sharing in Smart Homes.” In Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies. Bristol, UK, 2024. https://doi.org/10.56553/popets-2024-0051.

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