Data Protection at a Discount: Investigating the UX of Data Protection from User, Designer, and Business Leader Perspectives

Abstract

Smart homes are dangerous - a sentiment arising from prior research exploring the user experience (UX) of data protection for smart home devices. While this research has explored data protection shortcomings for users, UX is a designed encounter reconciling development, economic, compliance and strategic business priorities. And so, in addition to studying user perspectives, there is a gap in understanding how designers and business leaders influence the UX of data protection. To address this gap, we study smart home users, designers and business leaders, exploring how they experience data protection interactions, regulation, and processes. Our findings confirm that users have poor data protection interactions (e.g., consent and data access requests). We also find that business leaders and designers experience difficulties in identifying, applying, and tailoring suitable processes and practices for data protection for which some have developed "discount data protection": shortcuts, heuristics, and common sense practices to overcome these challenges.