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Some might freak out: What if your dog's activity tracker were to have a data breach?

Published: 10 January 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Activity trackers for dogs are increasingly popular, having the potential to improve pets' welfare and providing a 'digital voice' for expressing their needs. ACI research has so far mainly focused on their impact on the pet-human bond. However, also privacy considerations play an important role as they may pose significant barriers towards their wider adoption. We report on a mixed-method study (N=61) investigating what, if any, privacy concerns dog owners hold towards the data captured by their dog's device.
We elicited detailed reflections by participants towards the consequences for themselves and others of a hypothetical data breach leaking their dog's data. In addition, we captured several potential indicators for the perception of consequences: trust, perceived transparency, risk, benefit, and self-assessed knowledge of dog behavior (and thus its data). Statistical analysis of the findings indicated that perceived consequences were moderately correlated with trust and perceived benefit of use for society as a whole. A thematic analysis revealed that participants either did not see any consequences, saw consequences only when reasoning about others, or saw consequences to their own or dog's safety, rather than their privacy.
We discuss why these findings are worrying in light of the information asymmetry between consumer and service provider, setting out an argument why dog owners should care more about dog activity data and its privacy implications due to the data's ability to reveal potentially sensitive data about themselves as well as their caregiving.

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Cited By

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  • (2022)The Case for Animal Privacy in the Design of Technologically Supported EnvironmentsFrontiers in Veterinary Science10.3389/fvets.2021.7847948Online publication date: 7-Jan-2022
  • (2022)Security and Privacy Concerns of Pet Tech UsersProceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Internet of Things10.1145/3567445.3571102(155-162)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2022
  • (2021)Privacy labels should go to the dogsProceedings of the Eight International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction10.1145/3493842.3493888(1-10)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2021
  • Show More Cited By

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  1. Some might freak out: What if your dog's activity tracker were to have a data breach?

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    ACI '19: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction
    November 2019
    172 pages
    ISBN:9781450376938
    DOI:10.1145/3371049
    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 the author(s) 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].

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    Published: 10 January 2020

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    Author Tags

    1. ACI
    2. dog
    3. pet
    4. privacy
    5. wearables

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    View all
    • (2022)The Case for Animal Privacy in the Design of Technologically Supported EnvironmentsFrontiers in Veterinary Science10.3389/fvets.2021.7847948Online publication date: 7-Jan-2022
    • (2022)Security and Privacy Concerns of Pet Tech UsersProceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Internet of Things10.1145/3567445.3571102(155-162)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2022
    • (2021)Privacy labels should go to the dogsProceedings of the Eight International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction10.1145/3493842.3493888(1-10)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2021
    • (2021)Interspecies information systemsRequirements Engineering10.1007/s00766-021-00355-326:4(535-556)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2021

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