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Communicating Privacy: User Priorities for Privacy Requirements in Home Energy Applications

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Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2021 (INTERACT 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12935))

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Abstract

Perceived privacy plays a crucial role in the acceptance of technologies that rely on sensitive data. To mitigate concerns and build trust, privacy must not only be protected, but this protection should also be successfully communicated. Residential energy consumption data are at the center of applications that facilitate improved energy management and support a more sustainable future, but such data are privacy-sensitive since they have the potential to reveal a great number of details about the daily life of users. Our study contributes to an understanding of how to communicate energy data privacy via user interfaces by looking into the relevancy and accessibility priorities of potential privacy requirements in home energy monitoring, management, and production applications. All investigated requirements showed themselves to be of relevance to users, with control aspects (access, transfer, and deletion of data) being both perceived as most important and receiving the highest accessibility priority ratings, and control of data storage joining them as top access priority requirement. Our results indicate that placing the settings and information emphasized in our results prominently in the user interface, going through extra effort to ensure easy comprehensibility, and communicating them proactively, is likely to go a long way in successfully communicating privacy. Investigation of accessibility priority differences in relation to data storage location provided less clear answers but suggests a higher importance of access to general information on data collection if data are stored centrally and of the ability to view data if stored decentrally.

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Acknowledgements

The work presented in this paper has received funding from the Austrian Research Promotion Agency FFG under grant agreement n° 848811 (RASSA).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, Giefinggasse 2, 1210, Vienna, Austria

    Lisa Diamond & Peter Fröhlich

Authors
  1. Lisa Diamond
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  2. Peter Fröhlich
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Correspondence to Lisa Diamond .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, Polytechnic University of Bari, Bari, Italy

    Carmelo Ardito

  2. Computer Science Department, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Rosa Lanzilotti

  3. Computer Science Department, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Alessio Malizia

  4. Department of Computer Science, University of York, York, UK

    Helen Petrie

  5. Computer Science Department, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Antonio Piccinno

  6. Computer Science Department, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Giuseppe Desolda

  7. Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA

    Kori Inkpen

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Diamond, L., Fröhlich, P. (2021). Communicating Privacy: User Priorities for Privacy Requirements in Home Energy Applications. In: Ardito, C., et al. Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2021. INTERACT 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12935. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85610-6_38

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85610-6_38

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