Interdependent Privacy in Smart Homes: Hunting for Bystanders in Privacy Policies
Shuaishuai Liu, Gergely Acs, Gergely Bicz\'ok

TL;DR
This paper analyzes privacy policies of smart home devices, focusing on bystander privacy, revealing that vendors often shift responsibility to owners and highlighting the need for improved transparency and system design to protect non-users.
Contribution
It provides a detailed analysis of 20 smart home device policies regarding bystander privacy and offers practical recommendations for policy and system improvements.
Findings
Vendors acknowledge bystanders but mainly include disclaimers.
Current policies shift responsibility to device owners.
Real-world cases show impact on non-users.
Abstract
Smart home devices such as video doorbells and security cameras are becoming increasingly common in everyday life. While these devices offer convenience and safety, they also raise new privacy concerns: how these devices affect others, like neighbors, visitors, or people passing by. This issue is generally known as interdependent privacy, where one person's actions (or inaction) may impact the privacy of others, and, specifically, bystander privacy in the context of smart homes. Given lax data protection regulations in terms of shared physical spaces and amateur joint data controllers, we expect that the privacy policies of smart home products reflect the missing regulatory incentives. This paper presents a focused privacy policy analysis of 20 video doorbell and smart camera products, concentrating explicitly on the bystander aspect. We show that although some of the vendors…
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