Hi, my name is Neilly Tan and today I'll be presenting our
work titled, "Monitoring Pets, Deterring Intruders and Casually
Spying on Neighbors, Everyday Uses of Smart Home Cameras." As
one novel form of IoT, smart home cameras are increasingly
used for emergent applications beyond their basic use of home
security, like capturing funny moments, or for communicating
with children, neighbors and pets as suggested by marketing
materials. In contrast to these depictions, smart cameras also
encompass privacy concerns, security vulnerabilities and
potentials for bias and discrimination. These always-on
sensing devices collect a variety of data about users and
non primary users, such as bystanders, children, neighbors,
nannies, and more.
As such, the increased adoption of smart home cameras
foregrounds issues of surveillance, power and privacy
in homes and neighborhoods. Yet questions remain about how
people are currently using these devices to monitor and surveil,
what the benefits and limitations are for users, and
what privacy and security tensions arise between primary
users and other stakeholders. Against this backdrop of
concerns, I present an overview of an interview study examining
the overarching research question, "How and why are smart
home camera users actually using these devices?" And as part of
their scope, we also ask, "What if any concerns to use for home
camera users have with regards to privacy, security, trust and
control?" "How are people surveillantly using smart home
cameras in relationship to others?" "And how might we
approach the design of smart home cameras and similar
technologies to better address the needs of both the primary
users who own and operate these devices, and other people who
are surveilled and otherwise affected by them?"
Our study methods consisted of 90 minute semi structured
interviews via zoom and in person with 14 participants who
represented a range of experiences with smart home
cameras from living in a rural to urban locations, or owning as
few as one camera or as many as 25. Our investigation also
included two non primary users. The semi structured interviews
consisted of an initial device tour, and we then discussed
participants current practices, mental models, household
dynamics, and other factors they consider when interacting with
smart cameras. From here we conducted a thematic analysis to
iteratively identify themes from our data, including categories
of use surveillance, trust and concern for others. Here I'll
discuss the three clusters of findings we discover from our
study, surrounding current uses, types of everyday surveillance,
and axes of asymmetry.
So first, we describe how and why participants use for home
cameras. We observe that overall, smart home cameras are
increasingly being used as extended sensory perception
devices. So more than security cameras, they were serving the
purpose of communication and cross platform devices. One
example here is P8's anticipatory monitoring of her
kids on the left and doorway on the right, where she
demonstrated how she uses a Facebook portal display screen
next to her home office work computer to monitor her child
playing outside.
In addition to extending one's perceptual reach, smart home
cameras also extended temporal relations by stretching, or
reconfiguring time or temporal boundaries, through allowing
users to retrospectively review events or as knowledge or
evidence through video and audio recordings, alongside metadata
such as timestamps and filtered events. So here participants
examples ranged from playful or curiosity driven interactions,
more serious incidents, like listening in on neighbors
conversations, or what some participants in our study
referred to as 'people watching' through a smart camera, to
settling interpersonal disputes between family members.
So these themes lead us to our next finding, as we
contextualize the smart home camera users as different types
of everyday surveillance purposes. As shown in this
table, this surveillance taxonomy encompasses more casual
forms of surveillance for fun to need based applications of
surveillance to manage children or home workers. And as we
identify these six types of surveillance, they can also
overlap, intersect, and cross boundaries between each other.
For the sake of time I'll elaborate about two types of
surveillance.
Care-based surveillance is when participants use for smart
cameras in ways to care for loved ones. And diagnostic and
evidentiary surveillance is when participants use cameras to
diagnose the cause or effect of an event or as evidence. So here
we see a quote from P4 who demonstrates both care based and
diagnostic forms of surveillance, where she
describes how the smart home camera extends her ability to
care for her daughter and husband, and helps her to make
sense of when and how they experience falls due to their
medical conditions.
Finally, we report on different axes of asymmetry with
significant implications for privacy, security, trust and
power. So from our study, we find two axes of power
asymmetries with smart home camera users, one, frontstage
and backstage users, and two, primary and non primary users.
So a backstage user, like a smart home camera company, or a
hacker, is anyone who accesses the system and its data in which
the front stage user, such as a smart home camera owner, is
oblivious to or only peripherally aware of the
backseat user and their uses. And as we've discussed
previously, a non primary user is someone who does not own or
operate the device as a primary user, but is otherwise affected
by them. So here in the below example, P2 describes how he no
longer has a paid subscription with his Ring camera stating,
"If you're not paying them, they're probably just not
recording anything." Here we see P2 hypothesizing the actions of
backstage users especially related to ideas of cloud
computing, based on front stage interface elements such as the
subscription model.
Now when discussing the perspective of non primary
users, P6 who's a delivery driver, avoids smart home
cameras by driving past them or parking behind them to stay out
of the camera's frame. She discussed how this was a breach
of privacy as a camera is not selective on who is filming. And
we see how the topic of non primary users intersects with
race and marginality as P10 commented on how the Ring
Neighbors application, where people post a request smart
camera videos of incidents, enables people to racially
target non primary users with unsubstantiated claims.
So as we've discussed in our findings, in sum our research
leads us to these key insights: that people use for home cameras
as multifunctional knowledges for users like communication,
sense making, care, and curiosity, and that smart home
cameras are spatially sensitive and perceptually powerful
devices, which invariably involve non primary users, and
that smart cameras support enable and invite a variety of
emergent surveillance uses.
As a result, we confer those following design directions,
though, I invite you to read the paper for additional
recommendations. One, that there needs to be shared or negotiated
privacy controls between primary and non primary users. So we
might imagine legal provisions requiring that smart home
service providers provide ways for people to opt out of video
feeds through the use of dynamic masking to block their faces or
bodies. Moreover, our findings suggest some latent and embedded
privacy safeguards. For example, many participants opted out of
cloud subscriptions because it was expensive, or they had
concerns with their data being stored. However, opting out of
cloud subscriptions, in turn inhibits users from acquiring
detailed searchable databases about non primary users. And
looking beyond to policy implications. Our research
suggests that policy must consider privacy and data
collection and contextual ways in which law and policy needs to
recognize new mechanisms for legally collecting or using data
beyond current individually focused privacy notice and
consent models.
In all, through our qualitative interviews, we investigate smart
home camera users' motivations, practices, privacy concerns, and
social negotiations. Our findings highlight the smart
home camera as a perceptually, powerful and spatially sensitive
device that enables a variety of surveillance uses outside of
basic home security. We categorize surveillant smart
home camera uses, identify power asymmetries, and highlight under
considered design directions for addressing power imbalances
among primary and non primary users. And that concludes my
presentation. Thank you so much for listening and I'm happy to
take questions now.