A Room With an Overview: Towards Meaningful Transparency for the Consumer Internet of Things

TL;DR

This work investigates how to achieve meaningful transparency in the consumer IoT, focusing on smart homes. It adopts a three-study, user-centric methodology—survey, co-design workshops, and evaluation—to elicit user requirements and practical design elements for transparency interfaces. The key contributions are a taxonomy of user-derived transparency requirements, a set of co-designed interface design elements, and validation showing usability and coverage across a new user cohort, illustrating paths to more accountable IoT deployments. The findings have practical implications for designers, researchers, and policymakers aiming to enhance oversight, privacy, and security in everyday connected environments.

Abstract

As our physical environments become ever-more connected, instrumented and automated, it can be increasingly difficult for users to understand what is happening within them and why. This warrants attention; with the pervasive and physical nature of the IoT comes risks of data misuse, privacy, surveillance, and even physical harm. Such concerns come amid increasing calls for more transparency surrounding technologies (in general), as a means for supporting scrutiny and accountability. This paper explores the practical dimensions to transparency mechanisms within the consumer IoT. That is, we consider how smart homes might be made more meaningfully transparent, so as to support users in gaining greater understanding, oversight, and control. Through a series of three user-centric studies, we (i) survey prospective smart home users to gain a general understanding of what meaningful transparency within smart homes might entail; (ii) identify categories of user-derived requirements and design elements (design features for supporting smart home transparency) that have been created through two co-design workshops; and (iii) validate these through an evaluation with an altogether new set of participants. In all, these categories of requirements and interface design elements provide a foundation for understanding how meaningful transparency might be achieved within smart homes, and introduces several wider considerations for doing so.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: Meaningful transparency supports stakeholders in understanding, taking action, contestation and enacting change.
• Figure 2: The majority of Study 1 respondents were concerned about the nature and operation of smart devices, and interested in finding out more about them.
• Figure 3: A screenshot from Group 2's MURAL board. Participants could co-create requirements (sticky notes) and prioritise them as either 'Must', 'Should', or 'Could' by moving them into boxes.
• Figure 4: Derived categories of requirements (with examples) that focused on transparency.
• Figure 5: Other categories of derived requirements (with examples) regarding broader concerns.