Intelligent Personal Assistants and the Intercultural Negotiations of Dataveillance in Platformed Households

Abstract

The platformization of households is increasingly possible with the introduction of “intelligent personal assistants” (IPAs) embedded in smart, always-listening speakers and screens, such as Google Home and the Amazon Echo. These devices exemplify Zuboff’s “surveillance capitalism” by commodifying familial and social spaces and funneling data into corporate networks. However, the motivations driving the development of these platforms—and the dataveillance they afford—vary: Amazon appears focused on collecting user data to drive personalized sales across its shopping platform, while Google relies on its vast dataveillance infrastructure to build its AI-driven targeted advertising platform. This paper draws on cross-cultural focus groups regarding IPAs in the Netherlands and the United States. It reveals how respondents in these two countries articulate divergent ways of negotiating the dataveillance affordances and privacy concerns of these IPA platforms. These findings suggest the need for a nuanced approach to combating and limiting the potential harms of these home devices, which may otherwise be seen as equivalents.

Privacy and smart speakers: A multi-dimensional approach

“…While smart speakers have enjoyed rapid uptake among consumers, research has only started to investigate this technology (Hoy 2018;Smith 2020). Much of the early research has been published in the fields of computer science and human-computer interaction (Feng, Fawaz, and Shin 2017;Geeng and Roesner 2019;Lau, Zimmerman, and Schaub 2018;Luger and Sellen 2016;Malkin et al 2019;Zheng et al 2018), with only limited discussion in the social sciences (Brause and Blank 2020;Pridmore et al 2019). Recent humanmachine communication research, however, has quickly advanced our understanding of communication modalities with smart speakers and other non-embodied virtual personal assistants (Guzman 2017(Guzman , 2019.…”

Objectifying the Platform Society: Investigating Users’ Perception of Smart Speakers' Algorithmic Suggestions and Data Processing

“…The research evidenced that users are partially aware of platforms' and algorithms' pervasiveness, on the one side, taking them for granted and do not questioning them, but, on the other side, being conscious of them and trying to avoid or limit them. This nuanced approach confirms the influence of culture and context in the users' perception of algorithmic suggestions and data treatment (Pridmore et al, 2019), making it necessary to broaden cross-cultural research.…”

“…The transformative power of platforms into society has been extensively studied in the frameworks of platform society (Van Dijck, Poell, & De Waal, 2018) and platformization (Helmond, 2015;Van Dijck et al, 2018) and recognized to affect technological, social, and economic processes in several sectors (Nieborg & Poell, 2018;Van Dijck et al, 2018). The fast diffusion of smart speakers (Bentley et al, 2018) brought platforms' and algorithms' logics into everyday life to the point that researchers speak of "platformed households" with implications regarding surveillance and privacy (Pridmore et al, 2019). There is, thus, a strong need of investigating smart speakers' diffusion and their sociocultural impact also in other countries than the United States where they diffused and were researched first.…”

Personal choices and situated data: Privacy negotiations and the acceptance of household Intelligent Personal Assistants

“…In these discussions, our European based respondents demonstrated a clear awareness of and concern about the platforms' push for more presence in their lives. This has not yet been described in US based research (see also Pridmore et al, 2019). They see and respond differently to platforms' apparent intentions in terms of data production with these devices.…”