Abstract
Smart Assistants have rapidly emerged in smartphones, vehicles, and many smart home devices. Establishing comfortable personal spaces in smart cities requires that these smart assistants are transparent in design and implementation—a fundamental trait required for their validation and accountability. In this article, we take the case of Google Assistant (GA), a state-of-the-art smart assistant, and perform its diagnostic analysis from the transparency and accountability perspectives. We compare our discoveries from the analysis of GA with those of four leading smart assistants. We use two online user studies (N = 100 and N = 210) conducted with students from four universities in three countries (China, Italy, and Pakistan) to learn whether risk communication in GA is transparent to its potential users and how it affects them. Our research discovered that GA has unusual permission requirements and sensitive Application Programming Interface (API) usage, and its privacy requirements are not transparent to smartphone users. The findings suggest that this lack of transparency makes the risk assessment and accountability of GA difficult posing risks to establishing private and secure personal spaces in a smart city. Following the separation of concerns principle, we suggest that autonomous bodies should develop standards for the design and development of smart city products and services.
Highlights
Transparency and traceability of modern computing systems have emerged as the top strategic trends due to the rapid spread of complex smart city technologies, and the issues that they are introducing [1]
With the purpose to demonstrate the importance of the role of transparency in the design of smart assistants and find its impact on their accountability and privacy protection of smart city citizens, this work makes the following contributions
With the purpose to demonstrate the importance of the role of transparency in the design of smart assistants and find its impact on their accountability and privacy protection of smart city citizens, this research was conducted to find answers to the following questions
Summary
Transparency and traceability of modern computing systems have emerged as the top strategic trends due to the rapid spread of complex smart city technologies, and the issues that they are introducing [1]. The level of transparency in the design and implementation of such a system can affect developers, end-users, society, experts/regulators, and deployers [3]. It enables end-users to understand the working of the system and builds their trust in technology. While installing Apps, we are informed of the permissions that an application needs to perform its functions smoothly These permissions determine the data and resources on our device that this application will be able to access and utilize. Please look at the functions that we offer you, review given permissions, and select the permissions that you think are necessary for these functions
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