Securing smart devices - developing messages to increase intentions

Smart devices are becoming an increasingly common sight in our households. They can be used to monitor energy consumption, assist with chores, increase comfort and entertain. However, smart devices also come with risks.  They collect huge amounts of data leading to privacy concerns and they are also vulnerable to cyberattacks which can result in physical, emotional or financial damages.

Currently, users of smart devices tend to do little to protect themselves. How can we increase users intentions to secure their devices? Research points to the Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) as a starting point. For example, perceived severity has been found to increase protection motivations for different smart home devices (Dupuis & Ebenezer, 2018; Nehme & George, 2022 Prange et al., 2022). Furthermore, there is also support that messages with the aim to nudge people into increasing security measures could be a potential effective measure (Prange et al., 2022).

Based on these findings you will develop messages of your own with the aim to increase intentions to secure smart devices. Potential variables to base messages on include: Perceived severity, Response efficacy, response cost and subjective norms.

Smart device, smart speaker, security, intentions

A potential research question could be:

1. Do PMT-based messages increase intentions to secure smart devices?
2. Which psychological variable moderates the effect of the messages?

Research questions may be changed based on the student’s interests.

In an online experimental study, you will present participants with messages and measure their intentions.

Quantitative data will be analysed in R.

Please contact Marleen Haandrikman (m.j.m.haandrikman@utwente.nl) when you are interested in this assignment. The assignment is open to 2 students. The student taking on this assignment can preferably understand sufficient Dutch.  

• Dupuis, M., & Ebenezer, M. (2018, September). Help wanted: Consumer privacy behavior and smart home internet of things (iot) devices. In Proceedings of the 19th annual SIG conference on information technology education (pp. 117-122). https://doi.org/10.1145/3241815.3241869
• Nehme, A., & George, J. F. (2022). Approaching IT security & avoiding threats in the smart home context. Journal of Management Information Systems, 39(4), 1184-1214. https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2022.2127449
• Prange, S., Thiem, N., Fröhlich, M., & Alt, F. (2022, June). “Secure Settings Are Quick and Easy!”–motivating end-users to choose secure smart home configurations. In Proceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (pp. 1-9). https://doi.org/10.1145/3531073.3531089