Chatbots: Security, privacy, data protection, and social aspects

Abstract

Chatbots are artificial communication systems becoming increasingly popular and not all their security questions are clearly solved. People use chatbots for assistance in shopping, bank communication, meal delivery, healthcare, cars, and many other actions.However, it brings an additional security risk and creates serious security challenges which have to be handled. Understanding the underlying problems requires defining the crucial steps in the techniques used to design chatbots related to security. There are many factors increasing security threats and vulnerabilities. All of them are comprehensively studied, and security practices to decrease security weaknesses are presented. Modern chatbots are no longer rule-based models, but they employ modern natural language and machine learning techniques. Such techniques learn from a conversation, which can contain personal information. The paper discusses circumstances under which such data can be used and how chatbots treat them. Many chatbots operate on a social/messaging platform, which has their terms and conditions about data. The paper aims to present a comprehensive study of security aspects in communication with chatbots. The article could open a discussion and highlight the problems of data storage and usage obtained from the communication user-chatbot and propose some standards to protect the user. K E Y W O R D Schat, chatbots, data protection, GDPR, security, virtual assistants * A bot is sometimes referred to as a chatbot, but to be precise, a bot is a computer program (tool) that automates processes. A chatbot is a sub-genre of the bot environment with a focus on talking or conversation. Some companies instead of Chatbot use the name 'Conversational AI' or ' AI chatbots' to highlight that their chatbot is powered by machine learning and information retrieval techniques. In this article the term 'chatbot' is used for all types of chatbots.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

Trust and digital privacy: willingness to disclose personal information to banking chatbot services

“…Future research in the formulating of questions and the triggering of privacy concerns would be another welcome addition (Aguirre et al 2015 ), as would further research on privacy-leakage (Xu et al 2021 ). Additional research can focus on messaging specific themes (use of language, colloquialism and personalities) in order to create a more comfortable user experience that encourages the disclosing of information as well as the possibilities of chatbot to chatbot interactions (Hasal et al 2021 ; de Cosmo et al 2021 ). A comparison between chatbot interactions and live chat interactions (Rajaobelina 2021b ) could also help to build an effectiveness measurement framework.…”

“…A chatbot, an Internet-based automated service used to facilitate conversation with humans, is one such way that demonstrates this, as it offers a customer service with personal responses to specific needs and questions (Hasal et al 2021 ; Van Eeuwen 2017 ). Chatbots are generally either rule based or self-learning (Jang et al 2021 ; Khan et al 2019 ).…”

Gamification on Chatbot-Based Learning Media: a Review and Challenges

“…The irresistible data security and privacy issues may increase the risk of vulnerabilities and security threats in the future [38]. Regarding learning media chatbot with gamification, the privacy issue might also come from the leaderboard feature.…”

“…To cope with the security and privacy issues raised by the chatbot system, Hasal suggests three different approaches: the use of authentication and authorization, end-to-end encryption, and self-destruction message [38]. This approach may run smoothly on the technical aspect.…”

Human oriented solutions for intelligent analysis, multimedia and communication systems

“…The article entitled "Chatbots: Security, Privacy, Data Protection and Social Aspects" by Hasal et al 11 presents all security aspects concerning communication with chatbots. It provides a review describing important steps in chatbot design techniques considering the chatbot security.…”