description
“I am not doing anything secret in my home, so it would not be a big problem if I would get hacked”.
Analysing factors that undermine risk perception and protective action around smart home devices.
From qualitative research it appears that some concern over privacy and security of smarthome devices exists among consumers, but that the extent to which people are concerned is limited. Consumers seem to have various more or less valid arguments for why they are not very concerned and are not taking action, such as not finding themselves an interesting target for hackers, believing that having so much data out there already means that some more does not make a difference anymore, trusting the manufacturers of the smart devices to care for their privacy and security, and not knowing how to use the devices more safely
(Emami-Naeini et al., 2017, 2019; Ghiglieri et al., 2017; Lau et al., 2018; Zeng et al., 2017).
In this BSc thesis research you are going to develop a model that explains (lack of) privacy and security risk perception of smart devices and privacy- and security-protective behaviour, with the goal of identifying key beliefs and misbeliefs that keep people from taking protective action. You will zoom in on a specific smart home device and/or a specific user, as it can be expected that each of these have a unique set of predictors for risk perception and protective action. Your research will culminate into suggestions for possible helpful interventions.
Research questions
Which reasons can be found in literature for low or high privacy and security risk perception about smart devices? Which of these factors most strongly explain risk perception about smart devices and which most strongly explain protective behaviours?
Research method
The research questions are addressed in a survey study.
Data-analysis
The data of this study will be analysed by quantitative data analysis programmes such as SPSS or R.
INFORMATION
Please contact Lynn Weiher (l.weiher@utwente.nl) when you are interested in this assignment. The assignment is open to three students.
Literature
Emami-Naeini, P., Bhagavatula, S., Habib, H., Degeling, M., Bauer, L., Cranor, L., & Sadeh, N. (2017). Privacy Expectations and Preferences in an IoT World. Thirteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2017).
Emami-Naeini, P., Dixon, H., Agarwal, Y., & Cranor, L. F. (2019). Exploring how privacy and security factor into IoT device purchase behavior. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300764
Ghiglieri, M., Volkamer, M., & Renaud, K. (2017). Exploring consumers’ attitudes of smart TV related privacy risks. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Including Subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58460-7_45
Lau, J., Zimmerman, B., & Schaub, F. (2018). Alexa, Are You Listening? Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 2(CSCW), 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1145/3274371
Zeng, E., Mare, S., & Roesner, F. (2017). End user security & privacy concerns with smart homes. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth USENIX Conference on Usable Privacy and Security. USENIX Association. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3235931