The increased use of smart-home devices in short-term rental properties raises privacy concerns that range from interpersonal entities’ monitoring and surveillance, to people’s data being collected, stored, and shared with institutional entities. In this paper, we focus on investigating the perspectives of short-term rental hosts’ and whether they try to reach a consensus regarding data collection practices privacy with guests.
This paper highlights hosts’ conflicting needs in protecting their short-term rentals versus protecting guests’ privacy. We describe hosts’ limited actions to ease guests’ privacy concerns, and we provide recommendations to improve platforms’ policies, guidelines, and design features to facilitate privacy negotiation between hosts and guests.
Read the paper to learn more about our methods, findings, and recommendations.
Park, Sunyup, Weijia He, Elmira Deldari, Pardis Emami-Naeini, Danny Yuxing Huang, Jessica Vitak, Yaxing Yao, and Michael Zimmer. “Well-Intended but Half-Hearted: Hosts’ Consideration of Guests’ Privacy Using Smart Devices on Rental Properties.” In Twentieth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security. Philadelphia, PA: USENIX, 2024. https://www.usenix.org/conference/soups2024/presentation/park.
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