Smart Homes vs. Safe Homes

When Rackham Ph.D. student Kaiwen Sun was preparing the nursery for her newborn daughter, the topic of video baby monitors became less of a research area and more of a practical consideration. While baby monitors seemed like a staple for any new parent, the cloud-based video footage for newer models of monitoring cameras concerned Sun, a scholar of human computer interaction with a focus on digital privacy and protection.

“I wondered how the data is collected and where it is stored—it’s probably shared and will be used for profiling, business analytics, and targeted ads down the road,” Sun says. “But beyond these business purposes, I also worry whether and how such data might be sold, and what might happen to this footage about family life if the company got hacked.”

Sun’s research identifies the privacy, security, and safety concerns of smart home technologies for families—and seeks to inform design interventions, influence policy changes, and shape educational practices that can lead to safer homes for the entire family.

While Sun ended up using a video baby monitor for about a year, the experience gave her first-hand knowledge of and empathy around the evolving considerations and family discussions parents are navigating around smart home technologies.

“As a new parent, I had to adjust to that transition identity-wise and thought smart home technologies could help me keep an eye on my child,” she says. “I suspect a lot of parents, when they jump to a tech solution, might find it hard to be fully informed, or think through the whole picture and all of its implications of how using certain technologies might affect children’s privacy, safety, and family dynamics.”

Digital Safety at Home

While it’s easy to imagine parent concerns over physical safety—a robotic vacuum running over tiny toes or the potential choking hazards of smaller components—less is known about how parents conceptualize the digital safety risks of smart home technologies, or how these risks are mitigated.

“In our human computer interaction research, we talk a lot about putting the user at the center. For me, the users are children and families. If we don’t understand their needs and lived experiences, there’s no way we can make something for them,” she says.

In a study led by Sun, “Child Safety in the Smart Home: Parents’ Perceptions, Needs, and Mitigation Strategies,” Sun seeks a deeper understanding of how parents conceptualize the physical and digital safety risks in children’s interactions with smart home technologies—and how parents mitigate these risks.

Highlighting analysis of interviews with 23 parents who use smart technologies in the home, the paper reported that parents are cognizant of some physical and digital risks of smart home technology prior to purchasing it, but they found new risks that they hadn’t previously considered once the technology was installed in their home. New risks included a child’s improper use of the tech and access to unsuitable digital content.

Parent Needs

Household rules and parental controls can get families so far, but many parent participants in Sun’s research also craved more nuanced product design features and functions to support children’s use. Parents were happy to allow kids to ask for a song via voice assistance but not asking “Alexa” to unlock the front door or adjust the water heater.

Parents also craved granular controls to aid in access changes as a child moves into their pre-teen years, affording the family an opportunity to give their teenagers more agency over technology use while striking a balance between having zero controls and very restrictive controls in place.

The devices that parents expressed the most skepticism about included cloud-based devices such as security cameras, smart locks, and smart speakers and displays. National news stories may have influenced opposition to smart devices, especially those with camera systems.

Sun notes a particularly unnerving 2019 headline about a Ring camera hacker impersonating Santa Claus and speaking to an 8-year old girl in Mississippi in an apparent attempt to terrorize her. While instances like this are rare, Sun wonders if they can be effective in helping families consider the implications of these types of technologies before purchasing and integrating them into family life.

“When society normalizes data collection, we grow accustomed to privacy tradeoffs. Perhaps we need these alarming stories to motivate behavioral change, even when the actual likelihood of children being threatened by hackers remains extremely low.” she says.

In terms of the harms done by data collection, Sun urges families to consider what data collection might do to an individual over their lifetime when it starts at such a young age.

“Companies are constantly making choices for us,” Sun says. “They decide what we should buy, listen to, watch, and eat. I wonder: Can we still teach kids to choose for themselves, or will we all end up following whatever the algorithms tell us to do?”

Accountability Through Policy

One important goal of Sun’s research is to inform national policies that aim to hold smart home technology companies accountable for child safety, similar to what’s common in other family-centric products like washing machines and cars.

“Without incentives, why would a company take action? Policy plays an important role in making sure companies are doing the right thing,” Sun says.

Parents cited in Sun’s article highlighted that tech companies should be held accountable for transparency regarding their data practices, which would be a big industry shift.

“Smart home devices collect a lot of sensitive information about families—voices, images, activities, location, preferences—and parents are often unclear how this data is used,” Sun says.

Multiple U.S. privacy laws require companies to obtain parental consent for processing of their children’s data, yet many tech companies avoid compliance by indicating that the product is for ages 13 and up—ignoring the fact that these technologies are designed for families’ shared use and household placement, where there are children of all ages present.

“Policies should require companies to be much more transparent, providing easy-to-understand ‘nutrition labels’ or guidelines about data collection, privacy settings, and potential hazards, especially when children are involved,” Sun says. “This empowers parents to make informed decisions.”

As part of her research outcomes, Kaiwen Sun created a workbook for families to learn more about home smart technologies and have guided conversations about household expectations when it comes to using these technologies.