Legal Obligation and Ethical Best Practice: Towards Meaningful Verbal Consent for Voice Assistants

TL;DR

This paper explores how voice assistants can implement meaningful verbal consent by analyzing expert opinions on requirements, balancing usability with ethical principles, and providing recommendations for regulators and developers.

Contribution

It presents a Delphi study identifying key requirements and disagreements among experts for designing ethical verbal consent mechanisms in voice assistants.

Findings

Expert consensus on consent requirements and challenges

Recommendations for regulators and platform developers

Key themes include user opt-out and minimizing consent decisions

Abstract

To improve user experience, Alexa now allows users to consent to data sharing via voice rather than directing them to the companion smartphone app. While verbal consent mechanisms for voice assistants (VAs) can increase usability, they can also undermine principles core to informed consent. We conducted a Delphi study with experts from academia, industry, and the public sector on requirements for verbal consent in VAs. Candidate requirements were drawn from the literature, regulations, and research ethics guidelines that participants rated based on their relevance to the consent process, actionability by platforms, and usability by end-users, discussing their reasoning as the study progressed. We highlight key areas of (dis)agreement between experts, deriving recommendations for regulators, skill developers, and VA platforms towards crafting meaningful verbal consent mechanisms. Key themes include approaching permissions according to the user's ability to opt-out, minimising consent decisions, and ensuring platforms follow established consent principles.