Privacy Analysis of Voice User Interfaces

• Main Authors: Farida Yeasmin, Sneha Das, Tom Backstrom
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: FRUCT 2020-09-01
• Series: Proceedings of the XXth Conference of Open Innovations Association FRUCT
• Subjects: privacy; voice user interface; notification modalities; user research
• Online Access: https://www.fruct.org/publications/acm27/files/Yea.pdf

While the popularity of voice user interfaces (VUIs) is increasing steadily, there is a lack of understanding about their impact on privacy. This has resulted in the rise of privacy concerns among users of VUI. Such privacy concerns include unwanted location tracking, unwarranted fingerprinting of voice data, listening to the users' private conversations without consent, and unwanted sharing of private data with other devices and services. In this paper, we present user research on the emotional experiences and privacy expectations of users from human-to-VUI interaction. Further, we investigate user preferences for privacy notification modalities in a VUI, with respect to different privacy contexts. We use a sequence of qualitative and quantitative data analysis techniques to identify these aspects from our user study. To validate our findings, we implement a prototype of a privacy-aware notification system for a VUI based application and evaluate its effectiveness. Finally, we provide guidance on improving privacy awareness of a VUI device.