skip to main content
10.1145/3025453.3025632acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageschiConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Spiders in the Sky: User Perceptions of Drones, Privacy, and Security

Published: 02 May 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Drones are increasingly being used for various purposes from recording footage in inaccessible areas to delivering packages. A rise in drone usage introduces privacy and security concerns about flying boundaries, what data drones collect in public and private spaces, and how that data is stored and disseminated. However, commercial and personal drone regulations focusing on privacy and security have been fairly minimal in the USA. To inform privacy and security guidelines for drone design and regulation, we need to understand users' perceptions about drones, privacy and security. In this paper, we describe a laboratory study with 20 participants who interacted with a real or model drone to elicit user perceptions of privacy and security issues around drones. We present our results, discuss the implications of our work and make recommendations to improve drone design and regulations that enhance individual privacy and security.

References

[1]
Maria de Fatima Bento. 2008. Unmanned aerial vehicles: an overview. Inside GNSS 3, 1 (2008), 54--61.
[2]
Philip Boucher. 2015. 'You Wouldn't have Your Granny Using Them': Drawing Boundaries Between Acceptable and Unacceptable Applications of Civil Drones. Science and Engineering Ethics (2015), 1--28.
[3]
Tom Buchanan, Carina Paine, Adam N. Joinson, and Ulf-Dietrich Reips. 2007. Development of Measures of Online Privacy Concern and Protection for Use on the Internet. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 58, 2 (Jan. 2007), 157--165.
[4]
Eric Baldwin Carr. 2013. Unmanned aerial vehicles: Examining the safety, security, privacy and regulatory issues of integration into US airspace. National Centre for Policy Analysis (NCPA). Retrieved on September 23 (2013), 2014.
[5]
Jessica R. Cauchard, Jane L. E, Kevin Y. Zhai, and James A. Landay. 2015. Drone & Me: An Exploration into Natural Human-drone Interaction. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 361--365.
[6]
Jessica Rebecca Cauchard, Kevin Y. Zhai, Marco Spadafora, and James A. Landay. 2016. Emotion Encoding in Human-Drone Interaction. In The Eleventh ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI '16). IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 263--270. http://dl.acm.org.proxy-um.researchport.umd.edu/citation.cfm?id=2906831.2906878
[7]
D. Cavett, M. Coker, R. Jimenez, and B. Yaacoubi. 2007. Human-Computer Interface for Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. In 2007 IEEE Systems and Information Engineering Design Symposium. 1--6.
[8]
Ann Cavoukian. 2012. Privacy and drones: Unmanned aerial vehicles. Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, Ontario, Canada.
[9]
Ethan Chiel. 2016. The Service That Promised to Keep Drones Away From Your Home Silently Shut Down. (2016). http://fusion.net/story/305654/noflyzone-no-fly-zone-drone-shuts-down/
[10]
Reece A. Clothier, Dominique A. Greer, Duncan G. Greer, and Amisha M. Mehta. 2015. Risk perception and the public acceptance of drones. Risk analysis 35, 6 (2015), 1167--1183.
[11]
Adam Conner-Simons. 2016. Wireless tech means safer drones, smarter homes and password-free WiFi. (2016). https://news.mit.edu/2016/wireless-tech-means-safer-drones-smarter-homes-password-free-wifi-0331
[12]
DJI Geo System. http://www.dji.com/flysafe/geo-system
[13]
Serge Egelman and Eyal Peer. 2015. Scaling the Security Wall: Developing a Security Behavior Intentions Scale (SeBIS). In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2873--2882.
[14]
FAA. 2016. FAA Aerospace Forecasts. (2016). Retrieved September 13, 2016 from https://www.faa.gov/data_research/aviation/aerospace_forecasts/.
[15]
Federal Aviation Administration 2016a. B4UFLY Smartphone App. (2016). Retrieved September 13,2016 from https://www.faa.gov/uas/where_to_fly/b4ufly/.
[16]
Federal Aviation Administration 2016b. Unmanned Aircraft Systems. (2016). Retrieved September 13,2016 from https://www.faa.gov/uas/.
[17]
Dan Gettinger and Arthur Holland Michel. 2015. Drone sightings and close encounters: An analysis. (2015). Retrieved September 13,2016 from http://dronecenter.bard.edu/files/2015/12/12-11-Drone-Sightings-and-Close-Encounters.pdf.
[18]
Eberhard Graether and Florian Mueller. 2012. Joggobot: A Flying Robot As Jogging Companion. In CHI '12 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1063--1066.
[19]
Kerry G Herron, Hank C Jenkins Smith, and Carol L Silva. 2014. US Public Perspectives on Privacy, Security, and Unmanned Aircraft Systems. (2014). Retrieved September 13, 2016 from http://crcm.ou.edu/pvcy2014/report.pdf.
[20]
Keita Higuchi and Jun Rekimoto. 2013. Flying Head: A Head Motion Synchronization Mechanism for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Control. In CHI '13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2029--2038.
[21]
Hyun Young Kim, Bomyeong Kim, and Jinwoo Kim. 2016. The Naughty Drone: A Qualitative Research on Drone As Companion Device. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Ubiquitous Information Management and Communication (IMCOM '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 91, 6 pages.
[22]
Chantal Lidynia, Ralf Philipsen, and Martina Ziefie. 2017. Droning on About Drones - Acceptance of and Perceived Barriers to Drones in Civil Usage Contexts. Springer International Publishing, Cham, 317--329.
[23]
A. Mashood, H. Noura, I. Jawhar, and N. Mohamed. 2015. A gesture based kinect for quadrotor control. In Information and Communication Technology Research (ICTRC), 2015 International Conference on. 298--301.
[24]
Mikhail Matrosov, Olga Volkova, and Dzmitry Tsetserukou. 2016. LightAir: A Novel System for Tangible Communication with Quadcopters Using Foot Gestures and Projected Image. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2016 Emerging Technologies (SIGGRAPH '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 16, 2 pages.
[25]
Robert Molko. 2012. The Drones Are Coming! Will the Fourth Amendment Stop Their Threat to Our Privacy? Will the Fourth Amendment Stop Their Threat to Our Privacy (2012).
[26]
A node.js client for controlling Parrot AR Drone 2.0 quad-copters. Retrieved from https://github.com/felixge/node-ar-drone.
[27]
Parrot AR.Drone 2.0. https://www.parrot.com/us/drones/parrot-ardrone-20-power-edition.
[28]
Erika Shehan Poole, Marshini Chetty, Rebecca E. Grinter, and W. Keith Edwards. 2008. More Than Meets the Eye: Transforming the User Experience of Home Network Management. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '08). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 455--464.
[29]
Chris Schlag. 2012. New Privacy Battle: How the Expanding Use of Drones Continues to Erode Our Concept of Privacy and Privacy Rights, The. Pitt. J. Tech. L. & Pol'y 13 (2012), i.
[30]
Irving Seidman. 2013. Interviewing As Qualitative Research: A Guide for Researchers in Education and the Social Sciences. Teachers college press.
[31]
Manya Sleeper, Sebastian Schnorf, Brian Kemler, and Sunny Consolvo. 2015. Attitudes Toward Vehicle-based Sensing and Recording. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1017--1028.
[32]
Jay Stanley and Catherine Crump. 2011. Protecting Privacy from Aerial Surveillance: Recommendations for Government Use of Drone Aircraft: Report. American Civil Liberties Union, Washington,D.C.,USA.
[33]
David Stuckenberg and Stephen Maddox. 2014. Drones in the US National Airspace System. International Journal of Aviation Systems, Operations and Training (IJASOT) 1, 2 (2014), 1--22.
[34]
Ja-Young Sung, Lan Guo, Rebecca E. Grinter, and Henrik I. Christensen. 2007. "My Roomba is Rambo": Intimate Home Appliances. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp '07). Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 145--162. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1771592.1771601
[35]
Teal Group Corporation 2016. Teal Group Predicts Worldwide Civil UAS Production Will Total $65 Billion in Its 2016 UAS Market Profile and Forecast. (2016). Retrieved September 15, 2016 from http://www.tealgroup.com/index.php/about-teal-group-corporation/press-releases/.
[36]
Richard M Thompson II. 2015. Domestic Drones and Privacy: a primer. Vol. 43965. Congressional Research Service.
[37]
Gregory Voss. 2013. Privacy law implications of the use of drones for security and justice purposes. International Journal of Liability and Scientific Enquiry 6, 4 (2013), 171--192.
[38]
Tyler Wall. 2013. Unmanning the police manhunt: Vertical security as pacification. Socialist Studies/Études Socialistes 9, 2 (2013).
[39]
Yang Wang, Huichuan Xia, Yaxing Yao, and Yun Huang. 2016. Flying Eyes and Hidden Controllers: A Qualitative Study of People's Privacy Perceptions of Civilian Drones in The US. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies 2016, 3 (2016), 172--190.

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)The Use of Drones for Mosquito Surveillance and ControlPractical Control of Mosquitoes as Disease Vectors10.1079/9781789248845.0005(80-106)Online publication date: 28-Jan-2025
  • (2024)Exploring the Application of Drone Technology in the Construction SectorSalud, Ciencia y Tecnología - Serie de Conferencias10.56294/sctconf20247133(713)Online publication date: 9-May-2024
  • (2024)Assessing Strategies to Overcome Barriers for Drone Usage in Last-Mile Logistics: A Novel Hybrid Fuzzy MCDM ModelMathematics10.3390/math1203036712:3(367)Online publication date: 23-Jan-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Spiders in the Sky: User Perceptions of Drones, Privacy, and Security

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    May 2017
    7138 pages
    ISBN:9781450346559
    DOI:10.1145/3025453
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 02 May 2017

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. drones
    2. privacy
    3. quadcopter
    4. usable security
    5. users

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Conference

    CHI '17
    Sponsor:

    Acceptance Rates

    CHI '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 600 of 2,400 submissions, 25%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

    Upcoming Conference

    CHI 2025
    ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 26 - May 1, 2025
    Yokohama , Japan

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)144
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)14
    Reflects downloads up to 10 Feb 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2025)The Use of Drones for Mosquito Surveillance and ControlPractical Control of Mosquitoes as Disease Vectors10.1079/9781789248845.0005(80-106)Online publication date: 28-Jan-2025
    • (2024)Exploring the Application of Drone Technology in the Construction SectorSalud, Ciencia y Tecnología - Serie de Conferencias10.56294/sctconf20247133(713)Online publication date: 9-May-2024
    • (2024)Assessing Strategies to Overcome Barriers for Drone Usage in Last-Mile Logistics: A Novel Hybrid Fuzzy MCDM ModelMathematics10.3390/math1203036712:3(367)Online publication date: 23-Jan-2024
    • (2024)Harmonized Skies: A Survey on Drone Acceptance across EuropeDrones10.3390/drones80301078:3(107)Online publication date: 20-Mar-2024
    • (2024)Mapping Safe Zones for Co-located Human-UAV InteractionProceedings of the Second International Symposium on Trustworthy Autonomous Systems10.1145/3686038.3686067(1-10)Online publication date: 16-Sep-2024
    • (2024)GUFO: Three studies in the initial development of an assistive drone for older people living independentlyProceedings of the 13th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3679318.3685409(1-16)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
    • (2024)Social Drones for Health, Well-Being, Sports and PlayAdjunct Proceedings of the 2024 Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3677045.3685462(1-4)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
    • (2024)Firefighters' Perceptions on Collaboration and Interaction with Autonomous Drones: Results of a Field TrialProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642061(1-19)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024)Drone Fail Me Now: How Drone Failures Affect Trust and Risk-Taking DecisionsCompanion of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction10.1145/3610978.3640609(862-866)Online publication date: 11-Mar-2024
    • (2024)Czech society and drones: experience, norms, and concernsDrone Systems and Applications10.1139/dsa-2023-006512(1-14)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2024
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media