Private homes are increasingly becoming smart spaces. While smart homes promise comfort, they expose most intimate spaces to security and privacy risks. Unfortunately, most users today are not equipped with the right tools to assess the vulnerabilities or privacy practices of smart devices. Further, users might lose track of the devices installed in their homes or are unaware of devices placed by a partner or host. We developed SaferHome, an interactive digital-physical privacy framework, to provide smart home users with security and privacy assessments and a sense of device location. SaferHome includes a digital list view and physical and digital dashboards that map real floor plans. We evaluated SaferHome with eight households in the wild. We find that users adopted various strategies to integrate the dashboards into their understanding and interpretation of smart home privacy. We present implications for the design of future smart home privacy frameworks that are impacted by technical affinity, device types, device ownership, and tangibility of assessments.
Thomas Neumayr University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria; JKU Linz, Mirjam Augstein University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Johannes Schönböck University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Sean Rintel Microsoft Research, Cambridge, Helmut Leeb University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Thomas Teichmeister University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria
Qin Wu The University of Auckland, Rao Xu Chengdu University of Information Technology, Yuantong Liu Chengdu University of Information Technology, Danielle Lottridge University of Auckland, Suranga Nanayakkara Auckland Bioengineering Institute, The University of Auckland
