Publication Details

Download

Philipp Thalhammer, Alexander Schmidt, David Mueller, Michael Huber, Sebastian Feger, Albrecht Schmidt
ConnectivityControl: A Model Ecosystem for Advanced Smart Home Privacy
In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM'23). ACM. Vienna, Austria. 2023. https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3626705 (bib)

Smart home devices with their sophisticated sensing technologies raise many privacy concerns. In most cases, they only function when fully connected to the internet in which case privacy exposure is greatest. Users currently have to either accept these privacy risks or remove devices from the internet or power plug, rendering them useless. Our demo is based on recent work advocating for advanced smart device configuration options across a spectrum of connectivity control options. We introduce a model ecosystem with four connectivity levels and a privacy label that informs about connectivity-feature trade-offs across those four modes. The presented ecosystem introduces two functional smart devices and demonstrates intuitively how configuration decisions impact information flow.