It was hard to find the words: Using an Autoethnographic Diary Study to Understand the Difficulties of Smart Home Cyber Security Practices

TL;DR

This paper explores how autoethnographic diary studies can reveal the challenges families face in implementing effective cyber security practices in smart homes, highlighting the value of reflective personal narratives.

Contribution

It introduces a novel combination of autoethnography and diary studies to understand user struggles with smart home cybersecurity from an expert and user perspective.

Findings

Autoethnographic diaries reveal user difficulties in applying security measures.

Structured prompts facilitate reflection on cybersecurity practices.

First-person narratives provide insights into everyday cybersecurity challenges.

Abstract

This study considers how well an autoethnographic diary study helps as a method to explore why families might struggle in the application of strong and cohesive cyber security measures within the smart home. Combining two human-computer interaction (HCI) research methods - the relatively unstructured process of autoethnography and the more structured diary study - allowed the first author to reflect on the differences between researchers or experts, and everyday users. Having a physical set of structured diary prompts allowed for a period of 'thinking as writing', enabling reflection upon how having expert knowledge may or may not translate into useful knowledge when dealing with everyday life. This is particularly beneficial in the context of home cyber security use, where first-person narratives have not made up part of the research corpus to date, despite a consistent recognition that users struggle to apply strong cyber security methods in personal contexts. The framing of the autoethnographic diary study contributes a very simple, but extremely powerful, tool for anyone with more knowledge than the average user of any technology, enabling the expert to reflect upon how they themselves have fared when using, understanding and discussing the technology in daily life.