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Projects
Bystander Privacy in Smart Homes
We study the privacy implications of smart home devices for bystanders—people who encounter these devices but are not their primary users.
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Studying bystanders’ experiences with smart home devices, and proposing solutions to support privacy and agency
IoT devices like smart locks, cameras, and speakers are becoming ubiquitous in public places and private homes. People who own and use these devices have their own set of needs and privacy preferences, but what about people who encounter smart devices while working in a home, visiting a friend, or staying at an Airbnb? This project, titled “Foregrounding Bystanders as Stakeholders in Smart Homes,” aims to identify the privacy needs of secondary users or bystanders who encounter smart home devices that they do not own or control.
When smart home product designers consider privacy, the focus tends to be on primary users rather than bystanders. However, bystanders can face more privacy risks in some cases, and may be unaware that their activities are being recorded.
We aim to understand the perspectives of primary users, bystanders, and developers of smart home devices regarding bystander privacy.
The project includes three main research activities:
- Investigating the experiences and privacy perspectives of primary users of and bystanders to smart home devices,
- Designing privacy frameworks for multi-user scenarios, and
- Developing interventions for smart home privacy.
This work has included a multi-country survey about people’s experiences in their own and others’ smart homes, a vignette-based survey comparing people’s views on bystander privacy in different situations, interviews with nannies and parents who employ nannies about smart home privacy views and how those devices reflect and affect working relationships, and a systematic review of literature focusing on recommended solutions.
To further inform interventions to improve bystander privacy in smart homes, we are conducting user testing of a prototype sociotechnical solution. Ultimately, this work aims to increase empathy to bystanders’ concerns, inform mitigation strategies, provide practical rubrics and tools for bystander protection, and motivate developers to implement them.
Project Team
Associated ICSI Group
ICSI Research Team
Alisa Frik
View BioAlisa Frik, PhD, is a Research Affiliate at ICSI and Co-founder of PrivacyRescue, a user experience research consulting collective.
Julia Bernd
View BioJulia Bernd is a Research Scientist at ICSI, where her research focuses on digital privacy, user expectations, and social impacts of technology.
External Collaborators
Alumni/Previous Contributors
- Serge Egelman
- Mobin Javed
- Maritza Johnson
- Noura Abdi
- Tess Despres
- Junghyun Choy
- Jose Such
- Marcelino Ayala Constantino
- Naomi Zacarias Lizola
- Xiao Zhan
- Eimaan Saqib
- Gerardo Sánchez Romero
Outcomes
Publications
- Eimaan Saqib, Shijing He, Junghyun Choy, Ruba Abu-Salma, Jose Such, Julia Bernd, Mobin Javed. Bystander Privacy in Smart Homes: A Systematic Review of Concerns and Solutions. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 32:5, 2025.
- Alisa Frik, Xiao Zhan, Noura Abdi, Julia Bernd. Who Cares? Contextual Privacy Judgments from Owner and Bystander Perspectives in Different Smart Home Situations. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETs) 2025:3, 2025.
- Ruba Abu-Salma, Junghyun Choy, Alisa Frik, Julia Bernd. “They Didn’t Buy Their Smart TV to Watch Me with the Kids”: Comparing Nannies’ and Parents’ Privacy Threat Models for Smart Home Devices. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 32:2, 2025.
- Tess Despres, Marcelino, Naomi Zacarias Lizola, Gerardo Sánchez Romero, Shijing He, Xiao Zhan, Noura Abdi, Ruba Abu-Salma, Jose Such, Julia Bernd. “My Best Friend’s Husband Sees and Knows Everything”: A Cross-Contextual and Cross-Country Approach to Understanding Smart Home Privacy. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETs) 2024:4.
- Eimaan Saqib, Junghyun Choy, Shijing He, Ruba Abu-Salma, Jose Such, Julia Bernd, Mobin Javed. Designing for Privacy Needs of Bystanders in Smart Homes: A Systematic Review of Recommendations. Presentation at the USENIX Conference on Privacy Engineering Practice and Respect (PEPR), Santa Clara, CA, USA, September 11-12, 2023.
- Julia Bernd, Ruba Abu-Salma, Junghyun Choy, Alisa Frik. Balancing Power Dynamics in Smart Homes: Nannies’ Perspectives on How Cameras Reflect and Affect Relationships. In Proceedings of the Eighteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) (pp. 687-706), 2022.
- Julia Bernd, Ruba Abu-Salma, Alisa Frik. Bystanders’ privacy: the perspectives of nannies on smart home surveillance. In 10th USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI 20), 2020.
- Julia Bernd, Alisa Frik, Maritza Johnson, Nathan Malkin. Smart home bystanders: Further complexifying a complex context. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Applications of Contextual Integrity, 2019.
About
Sponsors
- National Science Foundation CNS-2114229
- Previously received funding from the National Security Agency H98230-18-D-0006
Focus Areas
- Usable Security and Privacy by Design
- Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) and Interaction Design
- User Experience (UX), Usability, and Interface Design
- Collaborative Systems, Social Computing, and CSCW
- Wearable Computing, Ubiquitous, and Pervasive Systems
- Smart Cities, IoT Infrastructure, and Urban Computing
Get in touch
Want to discuss opportunities to work with ICSI? We’d love to hear from you.