Big Brother is Listening to You: Digital Eavesdropping in the Advertising Industry

In the Digital Age, information is more accessible than ever. Unfortunately, that accessibility has come at the expense of privacy. Now, more and more personal information is in the hands of corporations and governments, for uses not known to the average consumer. Although these entities have long been able to keep tabs on individuals, with the advent of virtual assistants and “always-listening” technologies, the ease by which a third party may extract information from a consumer has only increased. The stark reality is that lawmakers have left the American public behind. While other countries have enacted consumer privacy protections, the United States has no satisfactory legal framework in place to curb data collection by greedy businesses or to regulate how those companies may use and protect consumer data. This Article contemplates one use of that data: digital advertising. Inspired by stories of suspiciously well-targeted advertisements appearing on social media websites, this Article additionally questions whether companies have been honest about their collection of audio data. To address the potential harms consumers may suffer as a result of this deficient privacy protection, this Article proposes a framework wherein companies must acquire users\u27 consent and the government must ensure that businesses do not use consumer information for harmful purposes

Healthcare Voice AI Assistants: Factors Influencing Trust and Intention to Use

AI assistants such as Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri, are making their way into the healthcare sector, offering a convenient way for users to access different healthcare services. Trust is a vital factor in the uptake of healthcare services, but the factors affecting trust in voice assistants used for healthcare are under-explored and this specialist domain introduces additional requirements. This study explores the effects of different functional, personal, and risk factors on trust in and adoption of healthcare voice AI assistants (HVAs), generating a partial least squares structural model from a survey of 300 voice assistant users. Our results indicate that trust in HVAs can be significantly explained by functional factors (usefulness, content credibility, quality of service relative to a healthcare professional), together with security, and privacy risks and personal stance in technology. We also discuss differences in terms of trust between HVAs and general-purpose voice assistants as well as implications that are unique to HVAs.Comment: 37 pages. This is a preprint of the paper accepted for the 27th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW'24

Virtual Assistants: A Code of Ethics

An intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) like Amazon’s Alexa supports clients remotely by performing administrative, technological, or creative tasks. IVAs have become a part of our daily lives and collect large sums of data about their users, meaning we need a proper code of ethics to protect people’s rights to privacy as there are data leakage concerns. In this paper, I outline a code of ethics for IVAs based on research and a case study on Amazon Alexa to recognize the key principles that a code of ethics for IVAs requires to protect its users. This code of ethics can be used for development of new IVAs or updating of existing ones in order for them to follow improved ethics principles

Exploring children’s exposure to voice assistants and their ontological conceptualizations of life and technology

Digital Voice Assistants (DVAs) have become a ubiquitous technology in today’s home and childhood environments. Inspired by (Bernstein and Crowley, J Learn Sci 17:225–247, 2008) original study (n = 60, age 4–7 years) on how children’s ontological conceptualizations of life and technology were systematically associated with their real-world exposure to robotic entities, the current study explored this association for children in their middle childhood (n = 143, age 7–11 years) and with different levels of DVA-exposure. We analyzed correlational survey data from 143 parent–child dyads who were recruited on ‘Amazon Mechanical Turk’ (MTurk). Children’s ontological conceptualization patterns of life and technology were measured by asking them to conceptualize nine prototypical organically living and technological entities (e.g., humans, cats, smartphones, DVAs) with respect to their biology, intelligence, and psychology. Their ontological conceptualization patterns were then associated with their DVA-exposure and additional control variables (e.g., children’s technological affinity, demographic/individual characteristics). Compared to biology and psychology, intelligence was a less differentiating factor for children to differentiate between organically living and technological entities. This differentiation pattern became more pronounced with technological affinity. There was some evidence that children with higher DVA-exposure differentiated more rigorously between organically living and technological entities on the basis of psychology. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study exploring children’s real-world exposure to DVAs and how it is associated with their conceptual understandings of life and technology. Findings suggest although psychological conceptualizations of technology may become more pronounced with DVA-exposure, it is far from clear such tendencies blur ontological boundaries between life and technology from children’s perspective

Enhancing portuguese public services: prototype of a mobile application with a digital assistant

Trabalho de projeto apresentado à Escola Superior de Comunicação Social como parte dos requisitos para obtenção de grau de mestre em Audiovisual e Multimédia.A inteligência artificial (IA) está a transformar a forma como interagimos com a tecnologia, incluindo a forma como os cidadãos acedem e interagem com os serviços públicos. Portugal desenvolveu uma estratégia nacional para a adoção da IA, a fim de melhorar a experiência e o envolvimento dos cidadãos, com destaque para a inclusão digital e a digitalização da administração pública. Apesar dos progressos, o país está atrasado em relação a outros países da União Europeia no que respeita à transformação digital. Para simplificar e modernizar os serviços públicos, Portugal introduziu o portal ePortugal, que inclui o chatbot “Sigma” e uma assistente virtual, que neste momento ainda se encontra numa versão de teste. A adoção de sistemas de IA conversacional, como os assistentes de voz e os chatbots, tem o potencial de reduzir os encargos administrativos, melhorar a acessibilidade e aumentar a participação dos cidadãos. Este projeto visa conceber uma aplicação móvel para o ePortugal, que inclui uma assistente digital equipada com funcionalidades de texto e voz.ABSTRACT: Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the way we interact with technology, including how citizens access and engage with government services. Portugal has developed a national strategy for AI adoption to improve the citizen experience and engagement, with a focus on digital inclusion and the digitalization of public administration. Despite progress, the country lags behind other European Union countries in digital transformation. To simplify and modernize public services, Portugal has introduced the ePortugal portal, featuring a chatbot named “Sigma” and a virtual assistant that is currently being tested. The adoption of conversational AI systems, such as voice assistants and chatbots, has the potential to reduce administrative burdens, improve accessibility, and enhance citizen engagement. This project aims to design the ePortugal mobile application, featuring a digital assistant equipped with both text and voice functionalities.N/

Smart Humans... WannaDie?

It won't be long until our prostheses, ECG personal monitors, subcutaneous insulin infusors, glasses, etc. become devices of the Internet of Things (IoT), always connected for monitoring, maintenance, charging and tracking. This will be the dawn of the Smart Human, not just a user of the IoT but a Thing in the Internet. How long would it then take for hackers to attack us like they have been attacking IoT devices? What would happen if hackers were able to blackmail us threatening our IoT body parts? Smart Humans may become victims of the devastating attack of WannaDie, a new ransomware that could provide the plot-line for a possible future episode of the Black Mirror TV series.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, Accepted at the "Re-Coding Black Mirror" workshop of the International Conference Data Protection and Democracy (CPDP

Value-oriented and ethical technology engineering in Industry 5.0: a human-centric perspective for the design of the Factory of the Future

Manufacturing and industry practices are undergoing an unprecedented revolution as a consequence of the convergence of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, cloud computing, virtual and augmented reality, among others. This fourth industrial revolution is similarly changing the practices and capabilities of operators in their industrial environments. This paper introduces and explores the notion of the Operator 4.0 as well as how this novel way of conceptualizing the human operator necessarily implicates human values in the technologies that constitute it. The design approach known as value sensitive design (VSD) is used to explore how these Operator 4.0 technologies can be designed for human values. Expert elicitation surveys were used to determine the values of industry stakeholders and examples of how the VSD methodology can be adopted by engineers in order to design for these values is illustrated. The results provide preliminary adoption strategies that industrial teams can take to Operator 4.0 technology for human values

Research on Application of Cognitive-Driven Human-Computer Interaction

Human-computer interaction is an important research content of intelligent manufacturing human factor engineering. Natural human-computer interaction conforms to the cognition of users' habits and can efficiently process inaccurate information interaction, thus improving user experience and reducing cognitive load. Through the analysis of the information interaction process, user interaction experience cognition and human-computer interaction principles in the human-computer interaction system, a cognitive-driven human-computer interaction information transmission model is established. Investigate the main interaction modes in the current human-computer interaction system, and discuss its application status, technical requirements and problems. This paper discusses the analysis and evaluation methods of interaction modes in human-computer system from three levels of subjective evaluation, physiological measurement and mathematical method evaluation, so as to promote the understanding of inaccurate information to achieve the effect of interaction self-adaptation and guide the design and optimization of human-computer interaction system. According to the development status of human-computer interaction in intelligent environment, the research hotspots, problems and development trends of human-computer interaction are put forward