A look into user’s privacy perceptions and data practices of IoT devices

Abstract

Purpose With the rapid deployment of internet of things (IoT) technologies, it has been essential to address the security and privacy issues through maintaining transparency in data practices. The prior research focused on identifying people's privacy preferences in different contexts of IoT usage and their mental models of security threats. However, there is a dearth in existing literature to understand the mismatch between user's perceptions and the actual data practices of IoT devices. Such mismatches could lead users unknowingly sharing their private information, exposing themselves to unanticipated privacy risks. The paper aims to identify these mismatched privacy perceptions in this work. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted a lab study with 42 participants, where they compared participants’ perceptions with the data practices stated in the privacy policy of 28 IoT devices from different categories, including health and exercise, entertainment, smart homes, toys and games and pets. Findings The authors identified the mismatched privacy perceptions of users in terms of data collection, sharing, protection and storage period. The findings revealed the mismatches between user's perceptions and the data practices of IoT devices for various types of information, including personal, contact, financial, heath, location, media, connected device, online social media and IoT device usage. Originality/value The findings from this study lead to the recommendations on designing simplified privacy notice by highlighting the unexpected data practices, which in turn, would contribute to the secure and privacy-preserving use of IoT devices.

Do desire, anxiety and personal innovativeness impact the adoption of IoT devices?

“…With most homes equipped with Wi-Fi these days, a user has even lesser physical control over such IoT devices, which typically are Bluetooth enabled and constantly exchange data among themselves making them vulnerable to security threats. Scholars claim that there exists a wide chasm between the privacy perceptions of the users in terms of data they knowingly share and the data practices of IoT devices which collect varied information about users that includes personal, financial, health and social media data (Al-Ameen et al , 2021). Further, other data sources like the weather data (from the global positioning system fin the car and/or on the phone) or the local events data publicly and freely available raise security concerns as hackers can potentially triangulate different leads to discern usage profiles of device users.…”