Work From Home and Privacy Challenges: What Do Workers Face and What are They Doing About it?
Eman Alashwali, Joanne Peca, Mandy Lanyon, Lorrie Cranor
TL;DR
This study investigates privacy challenges in regular work-from-home (WFH) environments by presenting 14 privacy-invasive scenarios across audio, video, data, and autonomy categories to 214 US workers. Using a mixed-methods, scenario-based survey, it shows that privacy invasions are highly prevalent and cause discomfort for many, with autonomy-restricting scenarios producing the strongest distress, though harm is mostly psychological and minor. The findings reveal underutilization of smart privacy features compared with manual measures and reveal tensions around policies that restrict worker autonomy, suggesting policy and design changes to create healthier WFH environments. The work provides actionable insights for policymakers and technology designers to mitigate privacy risks while preserving worker autonomy, and it poses open questions about how visualization of smart measures might boost adoption. Overall, it highlights the need to balance organizational security with individual privacy and autonomy in the ongoing normalization of remote work.
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.