Re-Thinking Smartness : Designing More Ethical Connected Devices for the Home
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Oxford
Department Name: Computer Science
Abstract
Modern smart devices are capable of incredible things: making life easier, more enjoyable, and more secure. But this 'smartness' often comes at the cost of devices harvesting data from the home, constraining how we use them, and changing the ways we relate to each other. This thesis explores what it means for a device to be smart, the ethical concerns that smartness causes, and ways that we might re-think smartness to better support people's needs and values. It does so using four lenses of smartness, privacy, social actors, and respect. In order to better understand the problem, we begin by presenting the results of surveys and interviews investigating perceptions of what smartness is, and how it manifests across a variety of contexts. In doing so we identify concomitant ethical concerns, such as privacy and autonomy, and discuss the similarities and differences in how they operate across devices. We then follow up by addressing two of the identified problems in greater detail. We present the results of a six-week technology probe deployment designed to give people control over their connected devices by visualising and constraining their data flows. We show how participants preferences shifted over the course of the study and how, when given the right resources, people can learn and come together to solve privacy problems in the home. Secondly, we explore social concerns around voice interfaces, with a survey exploring correlations between trust, anthropomorphism, and relationship development with voice assistants. We show how people develop relationships with social devices in a similar manner to those between people, raising questions about the potential for social interaction modalities to be used to manipulate. The thesis then brings these lines of enquiry together by proposing the concept of respect as a lens for using standards of interpersonal interaction to evaluate interactions with smart devices. Practical and theoretical perspectives on respectful behaviour from a variety of disciplines are used to link the behaviours of intelligent systems to previous work on moral theory, agency, social hierarchies, and oppression. Drawing on each of these four lenses, the thesis closes by discussing potential ways to re-think smartness, reaping its benefits whilst mitigating its problems. From rejecting smartness altogether, giving people greater control over their devices, making devices more respectful, and using different conceptual models of devices, the thesis lays the foundations for more socially aware systems that use their smartness to support users in managing and enjoying life in the connected home.
This research comes under the EPSRC Cyber Security research theme
This research comes under the EPSRC Cyber Security research theme
Planned Impact
It is part of the nature of Cyber Security - and a key reason for the urgency in developing new research approaches - that it now is a concern of every section of society, and so the successful CDT will have a very broad impact indeed. We will ensure impact for:
* The IT industry; vendors of hardware and software, and within this the IT Security industry;
* High value/high assurance sectors such as banking, bio-medical domains, and critical infrastructure, and more generally the CISO community across many industries;
* The mobile systems community, mobile service providers, handset and platform manufacturers, those developing the technologies of the internet of things, and smart cities;
* Defence sector, MoD/DSTL in particular, defence contractors, and the intelligence community;
* The public sector more generally, in its own activities and in increasingly important electronic engagement with the citizen;
* The not-for-profit sector, education, charities, and NGOs - many of whom work in highly contended contexts, but do not always have access to high-grade cyber defensive skills.
Impact in each of these will be achieved in fresh elaborations of threat and risk models; by developing new fundamental design approaches; through new methods of evaluation, incorporating usability criteria, privacy, and other societal concerns; and by developing prototype and proof-of-concept solutions exhibiting these characteristics. These impacts will retain focus through the way that the educational and research programme is structured - so that the academic and theoretical components are directed towards practical and anticipated problems motivated by the sectors listed here.
* The IT industry; vendors of hardware and software, and within this the IT Security industry;
* High value/high assurance sectors such as banking, bio-medical domains, and critical infrastructure, and more generally the CISO community across many industries;
* The mobile systems community, mobile service providers, handset and platform manufacturers, those developing the technologies of the internet of things, and smart cities;
* Defence sector, MoD/DSTL in particular, defence contractors, and the intelligence community;
* The public sector more generally, in its own activities and in increasingly important electronic engagement with the citizen;
* The not-for-profit sector, education, charities, and NGOs - many of whom work in highly contended contexts, but do not always have access to high-grade cyber defensive skills.
Impact in each of these will be achieved in fresh elaborations of threat and risk models; by developing new fundamental design approaches; through new methods of evaluation, incorporating usability criteria, privacy, and other societal concerns; and by developing prototype and proof-of-concept solutions exhibiting these characteristics. These impacts will retain focus through the way that the educational and research programme is structured - so that the academic and theoretical components are directed towards practical and anticipated problems motivated by the sectors listed here.
Organisations
Studentship Projects
Project Reference | Relationship | Related To | Start | End | Student Name |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
EP/P00881X/1 | 01/10/2016 | 31/03/2023 | |||
1775871 | Studentship | EP/P00881X/1 | 01/10/2016 | 15/01/2021 | William Seymour |
Description | This award has been exploring ways to mitigate the ethical concerns raised by connected devices in the home in the present and near future. Through the research conducted, we have developed an understanding of the ethical concerns generated by contemporary smart devices from the perspectives or researchers and end users, derived from a literature review and interviews respectively. This understanding has been utilised to develop and deploy a software technology probe in three UK households, which explored how privacy-empowering tools might better help end users to control data sharing by existing smart devices. As a result of this work we have been able to develop a set of design goals for future smart devices based on philosophical accounts of respect, contextualised for the connected home through our previous work. |
Exploitation Route | The outcomes of the experiments and design goals could be used in the design of future smart home devices, and each research output identifies areas of promising future work. The source code for the technology probe is available online under an open source license, and can therefore be reused by other researchers and members of the public. |
Sectors | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software) |
Title | Aretha: Smart Home Network Disaggregator |
Description | Aretha analyses internet traffic from connected devices in the smart home in order to provide visualisations and analysis on what companies data is flowing to and where in the world those companies are located. |
Type Of Technology | Software |
Year Produced | 2019 |
Open Source License? | Yes |
Impact | This software was used to conduct an experiment resulting in a CHI publication (Informing the Design of Privacy-Empowering Tools for the Connected Home). Several academics have expressed interest in running the software for their own experiments. |
URL | http://github.com/OxfordHCC/Aretha |
Description | Is it Time Our Devices Showed a Little Respect? Informing the Design of Respectful Intelligent Systems |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Talk at the 2021 conference on privacy engineering practice and respsect, attended by practicioners and academics from around the world. Talk covered perspectives on what it means to respect people, exploring the role that respect plays in system design. I engaged with various interested people on Slack and had follow up conversations after the conference. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2021 |
URL | https://fpf.org/fpf-event/pepr-2021-conference-on-privacy-engineering-practice-and-respect-2/ |
Description | Oxford Crypto Party lightning talk |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Local |
Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
Results and Impact | Ten minute presentation on research undertaken on IoT privacy and security, planned to include pointers to help members of the audience download and run the research software used on the their own devices. The event was cancelled on the day due to corona virus concerns. ----- CryptoParties are FREE, beginner-friendly gatherings to help people of all ages and abilities to reclaim their privacy and power online. Our trainers are digital privacy experts who will help you with phone security, private communications, secure passwords, social media privacy settings, web browsing privacy and more. Oxford is full of expertise on technology, rights, cybersecurity and privacy. After the success of the first event in November, Open Rights Group (with help from Big Brother Watch) are running a second event. We are going to bring together local campaigners, techies, and members of the public to have a CryptoParty in the hope local activists may continue to spread digital privacy and empowerment through CryptoParties! |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020 |
URL | https://www.cryptoparty.in/oxford |
Description | Smart-home study weighs the privacy risks involved (Privacy Laws & Business 11/2019) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A magazine, newsletter or online publication |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | International |
Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
Results and Impact | Front page article in the September 2019 edition of Privacy Laws & Business on the data protection in smart homes project I am running (funded by the ICO). PL&B was established in 1987 and is read in by legal regulators, managers, lawyers, and academics in over 50 countries worldwide. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
URL | http://www.privacylaws.com |
Description | Stand at the 2019 Oxford Science and Ideas Festival |
Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Local |
Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
Results and Impact | Our stand at the IF Festival engaged members of the public on issues relating to digital wellbeing and online privacy/security. We provided handouts with follow-up information, and addressed questions and concerns that they had with their technology usage. We made a special effort to engage with children at the event, answering their questions and helping them to understand the issues that related to their own technology usage. Many of the people we talked to said that we had helped them to better understand and manage the technology usage of themselves and/or their families. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2019 |
URL | http://if-oxford.com/ |
Description | TIPS symposium poster presentation |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | National |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | The 2-day symposium in Edinburgh provided an excellent opportunity to connect with other PhD students and early career researchers working in the privacy and security space. The poster presentation helped increase exposure to ongoing research, and facilitated networking with similar projects at other UK universities. The workshop sessions given by leaders in the field presented further opportunities to discuss ideas by allocate time for deeper dives into cutting edge research areas. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
URL | http://pactman.uk/building-a-community-of-uk-tips-researchers-2/ |
Description | Who's storing your conversations? (Inspired Research Summer 2018) |
Form Of Engagement Activity | A magazine, newsletter or online publication |
Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
Geographic Reach | Local |
Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
Results and Impact | My front page article in the Oxford computer science department's magazine increased the reach of my research and engaged an audience of students, staff, and alumni. It has sparked many interesting conversations with those who have read it, who often report a better understanding of the material after reading the article. |
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
URL | https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/innovation/inspiredresearch/index.html |