Designing Trustworthy and Privacy-Conscious Smart Home Experiences for Older Adults
Post-Doctoral Research (University of Waterloo / Carleton University, Sep 2024 - Present)
Project Summary
- Individually lead UX research examining usable privacy of voice-enabled smart home and AI technologies for older adults
- Designed and executed interactive workshops with older adults exploring adoption and understanding of data collection and privacy of voice-enabled smart home AI technologies
- Collaborated with interdisciplinary researchers and stakeholders across privacy, accessibility, aging, and human-centered AI domains
- Supervised and mentored graduate and undergraduate researchers on research design, data analysis, and communication of insights
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- How does the way privacy policies and terms of service are written influence older adults' privacy concerns about voice-enabled conversational smart home technologies?
- How do Older Adults' understanding of privacy management of voice-enabled conversational smart home technology affect their willingness to adopt such devices into their daily lives?
- How can we improve the privacy management and communication of voice-enabled conversational smart home technology so that Older Adults' may feel more comfortable and safe to adopt these technologies into their daily lives?
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Current Privacy Policies and Terms of Service agreements contain jargon and language that may be difficult for Older Adults to understand independently, and are organized in a confusing manner
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There is no choice as to whether someone is able to share data with companies - it is a requirement of most technology usage, which can be a concern of privacy for Older Adults (and more generally, to all users of such technologies)
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Older Adults find it "inevitable" that they must share their personal data to use such technologies, though they express openness about such ideas as well:“I think it's reasonable. I think I'm pretty trusting, you know, and if you want to get along in the world, you sort of, this is the way the world is” .
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Older adults view the threat to their privacy as a factor of their perception of risk for that data to be directly and maliciously abused towards them directly by bad actors, and how important their personal information is to other actors.
Resulting Publications:
- Catherine Maddock, Christine Murad, Adam Loo, and Cosmin Munteanu. 2025. Older Adults and Smart Home Devices: A Legal Critique of Terms of Service and Privacy Policy Agreements of Voice-Activated Smart Home Devices. In International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, pp. 56-71. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2025.