Bachelor Thesis BCLR-2019-95

BibliographySöhnel, Steven: Privacy in the smart home.
University of Stuttgart, Faculty of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Information Technology, Bachelor Thesis No. 95 (2019).
83 pages, english.
Abstract

Nowadays, smart homes are more and more popular, and therefore, more and more widespread [Ins18]. The smart home is a home that is equipped with smart devices that collect and output information to increase the quality of life in a smart home. The smart home devices also offer the possibility to automate processes to make everyday life easier for the people involved. Moreover, the smart home should increase security and energy efficiency. Therefore, the smart devices are interconnected to control them remotely and to exchange information with other smart home devices. Smart devices pay no attention to who is present. This means that everyone present could access information that is not intended for them. Currently, there is no possibility to adapt the output to the present people. Furthermore, smart home devices, such as smart speakers or smart displays, often do not offer the possibility to protect access with a password. The lack of protection probably is because the home is a more or less private area, and therefore, the necessity for protection may not be so highly valued. As a result, there is no smart possibility to protect the privacy of the smart home owner towards the present persons. Therefore, the question arises, with which persons we want to share our various information at all. Previous research of Olson et al. [OGH04] already investigated the willingness to share information with different groups of persons. Their results showed that the closer the relationship to a person, the more one is willing to share information with that person. Furthermore, their results show that the participants clustered the information items and the persons into a set of categories. However, it is essential to note that one tends to share less information because even the willingness to share information with the spouse is at some information rather low. This work discovers which information one is willing to share with other persons that are present in one’s smart home. First, a survey is conducted to find out which groups of people are present at one’s home at all. An interview will then be conducted to determine which types of information one is willing to share with the different groups of persons. Finally, we discuss our results and the conspicuous features we have found. Our study shows that the willingness to share different types of information is complete depending on the information and group of persons. Thereby the results show that the information from the categories Messenger and Mail are the most private, and therefore, the willingness to share is by far the lowest. Besides, there is also information, such as the information from the Tool category, which one would share without concerns with all groups of persons. Furthermore, we have found that the willingness to share information is higher if one gains a benefit through it. This shows that privacy in the smart home is a complex and important topic. It is therefore essential that in the future, the output of smart home devices is adapted to the people present so that the privacy is protected.

Department(s)University of Stuttgart, Institute of Visualisation and Interactive Systems, Visualisation and Interactive Systems
Superviser(s)Sedlmair, Jun.-Prof. Michael; Voit, Alexandra
Entry dateFebruary 26, 2020
   Publ. Computer Science