Work From Home and Privacy Challenges: What Do Workers Face and What are They Doing About it?

TL;DR

This study explores privacy challenges faced by remote workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, revealing common invasions, worker responses, and gaps in privacy protection measures, with implications for organizational policies and technology design.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into privacy issues in remote work, highlighting the discrepancy between privacy threats and protective measures used by workers.

Findings

Privacy invasions are common and cause discomfort.

Most invasions are minor and psychological in nature.

Privacy-protective settings are underutilized.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped the way people work, normalizing the practice of working from home. However, work from home (WFH) can cause a blurring of personal and professional boundaries, surfacing new privacy issues, especially when workers take work meetings from their homes. As WFH arrangements are now standard practice in many organizations, addressing the associated privacy concerns should be a key part of creating healthy work environments for workers. To this end, we conducted a scenario-based survey with 214 US-based workers who currently work from home regularly. Our results suggest that privacy invasions are commonly experienced while working from home and cause discomfort to many workers. However, only a minority said that the discomfort escalated to cause harm to them or others and that the harm was almost always minor and psychological. While scenarios that restrict worker autonomy (prohibit turning off camera or microphone) are the least experienced scenarios, they are associated with the highest reported discomfort. In addition, participants reported measures that violated or would violate their employer's autonomy-restricting rules to protect their privacy. We also find that conference tool settings that can prevent privacy invasions are not widely used compared to manual privacy-protective measures. Our findings provide a better understanding of the privacy challenges landscape that WFH workers face and how they address them, providing useful insights to organizations' policymakers and technology designers for areas of improvements, to provide healthier work environments to workers.