Smart Household Devices and the Negotiation of Public and Private Spaces

Abstract

Traditionally, privacy in private spheres such as our homes has been all but taken for granted. However, with the growing number of smart household devices, this is changing quickly. When cameras, sensors and microphones become more and more intimate parts of our lives, continuously and inconspicuously collecting data about us, the traditional idea of those environments as private spaces is inadvertently warped. Traditional public spaces may in some cases even grant more privacy than our own homes do. In this paper, we examine the consequences that the clash between an individual’s expectation of privacy and the intimacy of modern data collection through smart household devices may have for the right to privacy - particularly its effects on individual autonomy - with the help of current and potential frameworks for how to understand the right to privacy in home environments and other spaces. Along the way, we discuss the issue of how to ascertain that the individuals utilizing smart household devices both understand how their data may be collected and used and have a sufficient degree of control over this usage. We find that the traditional reliance on the notion of space may be a liability rather than a helpful model for how to think about privacy, and that there is no one single solution to this issue; in a world in which computation becomes both more prevalent and more intimate, we need to explore several different models and ways of thinking about privacy. We discuss a few such models and how they may be applied, opening up for further research on the subject.