SPLICE

Incidental users of smart-home devices — people that come into contact with a device who are not the device’s owner or controller — often lack awareness of and control over the devices they encounter, and their data is collected without consent. Our study demonstrates that current consent practices in smart homes are insufficient and we provide specific recommendations to improve consent.

At the policy level, work is needed to establish legal frameworks that ensure that incidental users, especially those in vulnerable situations, are not pressured into accepting unfair data collection agreements. In the development phase, systems should include features that automatically inform incidental users and automatically delete queries from unknown users. 

You can learn more about this work and our specific recommendations to improve consent in smart homes here.

Chiang, Yi-Shyuan, Omar Khan, Adam Bates, and Camille Cobb. “More than Just Informed: The Importance of Consent Facets in Smart Homes.” In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–21. CHI ’24. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642288.