Smart Home Security Cameras and Shifting Lines of Creepiness: A Design-Led Inquiry

Through a design-led inquiry focused on smart home security cameras, this research develops three key concepts for research and design pertaining to new and emerging digital consumer technologies. Digital leakage names the propensity for digital information to be shared, stolen, and misused in ways unbeknownst or even harmful to those to whom the data pertains or belongs. Hole-and-corner applications are those functions connected to users' data, devices, and interactions yet concealed from or downplayed to them, often because they are non-beneficial or harmful to them. Foot-in-the-door devices are product and services with functional offerings and affordances that work to normalize and integrate a technology, thus laying groundwork for future adoption of features that might have earlier been rejected as unacceptable or unnecessary. Developed and illustrated through a set of design studies and explorations, this paper shows how these concepts may be used analytically to investigate issues such as privacy and security, anticipatorily to speculate about the future of technology development and use, and generatively to synthesize design concepts and solutions.

[1]  J. Freedman,et al.  Compliance without pressure: the foot-in-the-door technique. , 1966, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[2]  Helmut Krcmar,et al.  Big Data , 2014, Wirtschaftsinf..

[3]  Jules Polonetsky,et al.  A Theory of Creepy: Technology, Privacy and Shifting Social Norms , 2013 .

[4]  Liette Lapointe,et al.  When Too Much Usage is Too Much: Exploring the Process of IT Addiction , 2014, 2014 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[5]  Andrew DuBois,et al.  Close Reading: The Reader , 2002 .

[6]  Pamela J. Wisniewski,et al.  Resilience Mitigates the Negative Effects of Adolescent Internet Addiction and Online Risk Exposure , 2015, CHI.

[7]  D. Citron.  Hate Crimes in Cyberspace , 2014 .

[8]  P. Verbeek.  Obstetric Ultrasound and the Technological Mediation of Morality: A Postphenomenological Analysis , 2008 .

[9]  Lorrie Faith Cranor,et al.  You've been warned: an empirical study of the effectiveness of web browser phishing warnings , 2008, CHI.

[10]  Pamela J. Wisniewski,et al.  Risk-taking as a Learning Process for Shaping Teen's Online Information Privacy Behaviors , 2015, CSCW.

[11]  Richard Cumbley,et al.  Is "Big Data" creepy? , 2013, Comput. Law Secur. Rev..

[12]  Xi Zhang,et al.  Automated Inference on Criminality using Face Images , 2016, ArXiv.

[13]  Paul Dourish,et al.  Collective Information Practice: Exploring Privacy and Security as Social and Cultural Phenomena , 2006, Hum. Comput. Interact..

[14]  Chris Preist,et al.  Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems , 2015 .

[15]  Natasha Dow Schll.  Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas , 2012 .

[16]  Laura A. Dabbish,et al.  The Role of Social Influence in Security Feature Adoption , 2015, CSCW.

[17]  Deirdre K. Mulligan,et al.  When a Product Is Still Fictional: Anticipating and Speculating Futures through Concept Videos , 2016, Conference on Designing Interactive Systems.

[18]  Andy Boucher,et al.  Power to the people: dynamic energy management through communal cooperation , 2012, DIS '12.

[19]  James Pierce,et al.  Dark Clouds, Io&#!+, and [Crystal Ball Emoji]: Projecting Network Anxieties with Alternative Design Metaphors , 2017, Conference on Designing Interactive Systems.

[20]  Daniela Karin Rosner,et al.  Beyond the Prototype: Maintenance, Collective Responsibility, and Public IoT , 2018, Conference on Designing Interactive Systems.

[21]  Helen Nissenbaum,et al.  Privacy in Context , 2009 .

[22]  Pete G. Thomas,et al.  The SelfReflector: Design, IoT and the High Street , 2018, CHI.

[23]  James Pierce,et al.  Addressing Network Anxieties with Alternative Design Metaphors , 2018, CHI.

[24]  Nick Feamster,et al.  Spying on the Smart Home: Privacy Attacks and Defenses on Encrypted IoT Traffic , 2017, ArXiv.

[25]  J. Diamond.  Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed , 2005 .

[26]  James Pierce,et al.  On the presentation and production of design research artifacts in HCI , 2014, Conference on Designing Interactive Systems.

[27]  Norman M. Sadeh,et al.  Expectation and purpose: understanding users' mental models of mobile app privacy through crowdsourcing , 2012, UbiComp.

[28]  Gabriela Goldschmidt,et al.  The design studio “crit”: Teacher–student communication , 2010, Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing.

[29]  Finn Brunton,et al.  Vernacular resistance to data collection and analysis: A political theory of obfuscation , 2011, First Monday.

[30]  Carolyn Woodley,et al.  Creepy Analytics and Learner Data Rights , 2014 .

[31]  E. Shove.  Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality , 2003 .

[32]  Elizabeth D. Mynatt,et al.  Characterizations of Online Harassment: Comparing Policies Across Social Media Platforms , 2016, GROUP.

[33]  Shoshana Zuboff,et al.  Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization , 2015, J. Inf. Technol..

[34]  Eric P.S. Baumer,et al.  Usees , 2015, CHI.

[35]  Ron Wakkary,et al.  An Annotated Portfolio on Doing Postphenomenology Through Research Products , 2018, Conference on Designing Interactive Systems.

[36]  Ron Wakkary,et al.  Philosophers Living with the Tilting Bowl , 2018, CHI.

[37]  James Burton.  On Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth , 2014 .

[38]  Robert M. Chesney,et al.  Deep Fakes: A Looming Crisis for National Security, Democracy and Privacy? , 2018 .

[39]  Tom Jenkins,et al.  Cohousing IoT: Design Prototyping for Community Life , 2018, TEI.

[40]  R. Cialdini,et al.  Reciprocal Concessions Procedure for Inducing Compliance: The Door-in-the-Face Technique , 1975 .

[41]  Tung-Hui Hu,et al.  A Prehistory of the Cloud , 2015 .

[42]  John P. Healy,et al.  The Components of the "Crit" in Art and Design Education , 2016 .

[43]  Neal Bukeavich,et al.  Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed , 2006 .

[44]  Ben J. A. Kröse,et al.  Products as Agents: Metaphors for Designing the Products of the IoT Age , 2017, CHI.

[45]  Madeleine Akrich,et al.  The De-scription of Technical Objects , 1992 .

[46]  Finn Brunton,et al.  Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest , 2015 .

[47]  Tao Zhang,et al.  An Information Flow Analysis of a Distributed Information System for Space Medical Support , 2004, MedInfo.

[48]  The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power , 2020 .

[49]  Irina Shklovski,et al.  Leakiness and creepiness in app space: perceptions of privacy and mobile app use , 2014, CHI.

[50]  Joseph Lindley,et al.  Why the Internet of Things needs Object Orientated Ontology , 2017 .

[51]  William W. Gaver.  Making spaces: how design workbooks work , 2011, CHI.

[52]  Nova Ahmed,et al.  Protibadinext: sensor support to handle sexual harassment , 2016, UbiComp Adjunct.

[53]  John Zimmerman,et al.  Research through design as a method for interaction design research in HCI , 2007, CHI.

[54]  E. Weizman.  Introduction: Forensis , 2014 .

[55]  Adriaan Slob,et al.  User behavior and technology development : shaping sustainable relations between consumers and technologies , 2006 .

[56]  Laura Devendorf,et al.  Design for Collaborative Survival: An Inquiry into Human-Fungi Relationships , 2018, CHI.

[57]  A. Ferguson.  The Rise of Big Data Policing: Surveillance, Race, and the Future of Law Enforcement , 2017 .

[58]  Chris Speed,et al.  Thing Ethnography: Doing Design Research with Non-Humans , 2016, Conference on Designing Interactive Systems.

[59]  Donald A. Schön.  The Architectural Studio as an Exemplar of Education for Reflection-in-Action , 1984 .

[60]  Tom Yeh,et al.  More Than a Show: Using Personalized Immersive Theater to Educate and Engage the Public in Technology Ethics , 2018, CHI.

[61]  Mark Blythe,et al.  Solutionism, the Game: Design Fictions for Positive Aging , 2015, CHI.

[62]  Daniela Karin Rosner,et al.  Designing with traces , 2013, CHI.

[63]  Targeted Advertising , 2014, Encyclopedia of Social Network Analysis and Mining.

[64]  Balachander Krishnamurthy,et al.  Generating a privacy footprint on the internet , 2006, IMC '06.

[65]  Tawfiq Ammari,et al.  LGBT Parents and Social Media: Advocacy, Privacy, and Disclosure during Shifting Social Movements , 2016, CHI.

[66]  Allison Woodruff,et al.  The heterogeneous home , 2008, UbiComp.

[67]  Shoshana Zuboff.  The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power , 2019 .

[68]  William W. Gaver.  What should we expect from research through design? , 2012, CHI.

[69]  Helen Nissenbaum,et al.  Privacy in Context - Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life , 2009 .