Abstract
Smart home technology has the potential to support several tasks in the home, especially for older adults who are likely to increasingly experience difficulties with everyday activities. Trade-offs between privacy and autonomy, security, and comfort have been an ongoing discussion for over a decade. Although there have been significant advances in the technology available today compared to a few years ago, privacy communications to users accompanying these technologies have changed little. Much existing research in the smart home technology space focuses on the design of the technology itself; less has been done to ensure that older adults know where their data is going so that adoption of the technology is better informed, and so they feel more secure about using it. In this work a total of 30 documentations including 24 privacy policies of individual smart devices and 6 privacy terms and policies from platform providers were reviewed to understand their commonalities and shared limitations. Our evaluation revealed that the length of each ranged between 9 to 49 pages, and that such policies are rarely displayed to maximize user access and legibility, contributing to user confusion and concern. The results suggest a need for user agreements and privacy policies to be more easily accessible. Companies publishing privacy documents should be more mindful of how these are presented to the user, whether online or printed. This study recommends that companies should adhere to usability and readability guidelines and follow accessibility standards published by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. For older adults to successfully utilize smart home technology, adoption should happen in an informed manner. Sustained usage may also be encouraged with practices that make users feel confident and in control of their data. It is important that companies build their trust ethically, and ensure that older adults are not required to trade off their privacy for autonomy and security.
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Notes
- 1.
Mozilla Foundation. Privacy Not Included: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/.
- 2.
World Wide Web Consortium. (2018). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/.
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This study was supported in part by the MIT AgeLab’s C3 Connected Home Logistics Consortium.
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Vaidya, M., Lee, C., D’Ambrosio, L., Coughlin, J.F. (2023). Evaluating Privacy Policies and User Agreements of Smart Home Devices from the Perspective of the Aging Population. In: Stephanidis, C., Antona, M., Ntoa, S., Salvendy, G. (eds) HCI International 2023 Posters. HCII 2023. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1833. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35992-7_70
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