On Transparency and Accountability of Smart Assistants in Smart Cities

Abstract

Smart Assistants have rapidly emerged in smartphones, vehicles, and many smart home devices. Establishing comfortable personal spaces in smart cities requires that these smart assistants are transparent in design and implementation—a fundamental trait required for their validation and accountability. In this article, we take the case of Google Assistant (GA), a state-of-the-art smart assistant, and perform its diagnostic analysis from the transparency and accountability perspectives. We compare our discoveries from the analysis of GA with those of four leading smart assistants. We use two online user studies (N = 100 and N = 210) conducted with students from four universities in three countries (China, Italy, and Pakistan) to learn whether risk communication in GA is transparent to its potential users and how it affects them. Our research discovered that GA has unusual permission requirements and sensitive Application Programming Interface (API) usage, and its privacy requirements are not transparent to smartphone users. The findings suggest that this lack of transparency makes the risk assessment and accountability of GA difficult posing risks to establishing private and secure personal spaces in a smart city. Following the separation of concerns principle, we suggest that autonomous bodies should develop standards for the design and development of smart city products and services.

Ethical Issues in Near-Future Socially Supportive Smart Assistants for Older Adults

“…Near-future SAs of the sort that we consider in this paper would likely raise the full range of ethical issues that have already been discussed in the context of current SAs, assistive technologies [4], smart homes [5], IoT [6], and ubiquitous monitoring [7], [8], network security and surveillance [6], [7], [9], and multi-modal sensing including inputs from wearable and other devices [4][10] [11]. There is also a growing literature that surveys the broad range of ethical issues that have emerged in relation to AI, including reports by IEEE [12] and various governmental and non-governmental entities [13], [14], [15], [16], [17] .…”

“…The amount and types of data that assistive technology should collect, share, and store have been frequent topics of discussion [9]. Privacy concerns extend beyond physical behaviors and formal policies and include identifying system vulnerabilities, threats to safety and security [41], appropriate transparency and control, and recognizing differences in data sensitivity [8]. Currently available systems do not conform to transparency standards around privacy [8] and the techniques used by these systems, such as nudging [42] or hypernudging (personalized behavioral influences), puts data and assistance into such a tightly coupled loop between the user and a wide variety of support services, that understandability of data usage deteriorates significantly [43].…”

Smart ‘Tourist Cities’ Revisited: Culture-Led Urban Sustainability and the Global Real Estate Market

“…The flexible way of planning and programming, as well as the introduction of the digital platform in the urban system, enhances the processes of knowledge and innovation. In addition, the recording and collection of useful data, and at the same time its availability to the general public, enhance transparency in matters of the city, enhance citizen participation, and act as a lever for new opportunities for innovative entrepreneurship [126]. The lack of a clear definition of the notion of a smart city means that any city in the future can refer to itself as smart.…”

Voice assistants in private households: a conceptual framework for future research in an interdisciplinary field

“…VA applications and (potential) use cases Description Theoretical foundations of VA research and VA design principles Understandings intelligent VA and humanized VA, and anthropomorphism in VA interaction Concepts of challenges of VA user perception, use affordance and technology adoption Security and privacy protection concepts VA as emerging enabling technology Systemic security issues (access control, intrusion detection) UX challenges in multi-user systems Smart home customization, access (control, mobile), machine learning System set-up (e.g., raspberry pi solutions) Legal regulations, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), accountability (Online) Marketing strategies, advertising VAs to private households and institutions Raising awareness on how VA can make life/home more efficient Highlighting the link between low use and perceived low benefit. User perspectives, real-life use of VA Prototype tests with users Potential solutions for overcoming limitations of and extending existing home automation systems Opportunities of using VA in medical care, fitness and assisted living Future use cases: IOT forensics CS articles 45 93 12 43 SS articles 30 12 2 10 BMS articles 4 4 7 2 Total a 79 109 21 55 Representative publications CS Purington et al, 2017 ; McLean and Osei-Frimpong, 2019 ; Lovato et al, 2019 ; Lee et al, 2019 ; Aylett et al, 2019 ; McReynolds et al, 2017 ; Sanders and Martin-Hammond, 2019 ; Pyae and Joelsson, 2018 ; Elahi et al, 2019 ; Ichikawa et al, 2019 Vaca et al, 2019 ; Souden and Liu, 2009 ; Han et al, 2018 ; Liu et al, 2020 ; Oh and Kim, 2017 ; Tao et al, 2018 ; Malik et al, 2019 ; Samarasinghe and Mannan, 2019b ; Hu et al, 2013 ; Pyae and Scifleet, …”