Broadening Privacy and Surveillance: Eliciting Interconnected Values with a Scenarios Workbook on Smart Home Cameras

TL;DR

This paper presents a scenarios workbook used as a values elicitation tool to explore interconnected social values like privacy, autonomy, safety, and trust in smart home camera contexts, revealing complex ethical considerations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel speculative scenarios workbook for eliciting diverse social values related to smart home surveillance, emphasizing interconnectedness beyond privacy.

Findings

Participants reflected on a broader set of social values beyond privacy.

Scenarios revealed tensions between privacy and other social values.

The approach highlights the importance of considering multiple values in ethical research.

Abstract

We use a design workbook of speculative scenarios as a values elicitation activity with 14 participants. The workbook depicts use case scenarios with smart home camera technologies that involve surveillance and uneven power relations. The scenarios were initially designed by the researchers to explore scenarios of privacy and surveillance within three social relationships involving "primary" and "non-primary" users: Parents-Children, Landlords-Tenants, and Residents-Domestic Workers. When the scenarios were utilized as part of a values elicitation activity with participants, we found that they reflected on a broader set of interconnected social values beyond privacy and surveillance, including autonomy and agency, physical safety, property rights, trust and accountability, and fairness. The paper suggests that future research about ethical issues in smart homes should conceptualize privacy as interconnected with a broader set of social values (which can align or be in tension with privacy), and reflects on considerations for doing research with non-primary users.