Unpacking People's Understandings of Bluetooth Beacon Systems - A Location-Based IoT Technology

Bluetooth beacon technology is an emerging location-based Internet of Things (IoT) technology, designed to transform proximity-based services in various domains such as retail. Beacons are part of the IoT infrastructure, but people rarely interact with them directly and yet they could still pose privacy risks to users. However, little is known about people's understandings of how beacon-based systems work. This is an important question since it can influence people's perceptions, adoption, and usage of this emerging technology. Drawing from 22 semi-structured interviews, we studied people's understandings of how beacon-based systems work and identified several factors that shaped their understandings or misunderstandings, such as how information flows among the components and who owns the beacons. These understandings and misunderstandings can potentially pose significant privacy risks to beacon users

Privacy For Whom? A Multi-Stakeholder Exploration of Privacy Designs

Privacy is considered one of the fundamental human rights. Researchers have been investigating privacy issues in various domains, such as our physical privacy, data privacy, privacy as a legal right, and privacy designs. In the Human-Computer Interaction field, privacy researchers have been focusing on understanding people\u27s privacy concerns when they interact with computing systems, designing and building privacy-enhancing technologies to help people mitigate these concerns, and investigating how people\u27s privacy perceptions and the privacy designs influence people\u27s behaviors. Existing privacy research has been overwhelmingly focusing on the privacy needs of end-users, i.e., people who use a system or a product, such as Internet users and smartphone users. However, as our computing systems are becoming more and more complex, privacy issues within these systems have started to impact not only the end-users but also other stakeholders, and privacy-enhancing mechanisms designed for the end-users can also affect multiple stakeholders beyond the users. In this dissertation, I examine how different stakeholders perceive privacy-related issues and expect privacy designs to function across three application domains: online behavioral advertising, drones, and smart homes. I choose these three domains because they represent different multi-stakeholder environments with varying nature of complexity. In particular, these environments present the opportunities to study technology-mediated interpersonal relationships, i.e., the relationship between primary users (owners, end-users) and secondary users (bystanders), and to investigate how these relationships influence people\u27s privacy perceptions and their desired ways of privacy protection. Through a combination of qualitative, quantitative, and design methods, including interviews, surveys, participatory designs, and speculative designs, I present how multi-stakeholder considerations change our understandings of privacy and influence privacy designs. I draw design implications from the study results and guide future privacy designs to consider the needs of different stakeholders, e.g., cooperative mechanisms that aim to enhance the communication between primary and secondary users. In addition, this methodological approach allows researchers to directly and proactively engage with multiple stakeholders and explore their privacy perceptions and expected privacy designs. This is different from what has been commonly used in privacy literature and as such, points to a methodological contribution. Finally, this dissertation shows that when applying the theory of Contextual Integrity in a multi-stakeholder environment, there are hidden contextual factors that may alter the contextual informational norms. I present three examples from the study results and argue that it is necessary to carefully examine such factors in order to clearly identify the contextual norms. I propose a research agenda to explore best practices of applying the theory of Contextual Integrity in a multi-stakeholder environment