Abstract
The pervasive use of voice assistants has raised numerous privacy concerns. While work to date grants us an understanding of user perceptions of these threats, limited research focuses on how we can mitigate these concerns, either through redesigning the voice assistant or through dedicated privacy-preserving interventions. In this paper, we present the design and prototyping of two privacy-preserving interventions: `Obfuscator’ targeted at disabling recording at the microphones, and `BlackOut’ targeted at disabling power to the voice assistant. We present our findings from a technology probe study involving 24 households that interacted with our prototypes aimed to gain a better understanding of the design space for technological interventions that might address these concerns. Our data reveals complex trade-offs among utility, privacy, and usability and stresses the importance of multi-functionality, aesthetics, ease-of-use, and form factor. We discuss the implications of our findings for the development of subsequent interventions and the future design of voice assistants.
arXiv:1812.00263
Bibtex
@misc{chandrasekaran2019blackout,
title={BlackOut and Obfuscator: An Exploration of the Design Space for Privacy-Preserving Interventions for Voice Assistants},
author={Varun Chandrasekaran and Thomas Linden and Kassem Fawaz and Bilge Mutlu and Suman Banerjee},
year={2019},
eprint={1812.00263},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.HC}
}