The popularity and projected growth of in-home smart speaker assistants, such as Amazon's Echo, has raised privacy concerns among consumers and privacy advocates. Notable questions regarding the collection and storage of user data by for-profit organizations include: what data is being collected and how is it being used, who has or can obtain access to such data, and how can user privacy be maintained while providing useful services. In addition to concerns regarding what the speaker manufacturer will do with your data, there are also more fundamental concerns about the security of these devices, third-party plugins, and the servers where they store recorded data. To address these privacy and security concerns, we introduce an intermediary device to provide an additional layer of security, which we call the or Smart 2 for short. By intelligently filtering sensitive conversations, and completely blocking this information from reaching a smart speaker's microphone(s), the Smart @math Speaker Blocker is an open-source, network-local (offline) smart device that provides users with decisive control over what data leaves their living room.
Smart speakers with voice assistants, like Amazon Echo and Google Home, provide benefits and convenience but also raise privacy concerns due to their continuously listening microphones. We studied people's reasons for and against adopting smart speakers, their privacy perceptions and concerns, and their privacy-seeking behaviors around smart speakers. We conducted a diary study and interviews with seventeen smart speaker users and interviews with seventeen non-users. We found that many non-users did not see the utility of smart speakers or did not trust speaker companies. In contrast, users express few privacy concerns, but their rationalizations indicate an incomplete understanding of privacy risks, a complicated trust relationship with speaker companies, and a reliance on the socio-technical context in which smart speakers reside. Users trade privacy for convenience with different levels of deliberation and privacy resignation. Privacy tensions arise between primary, secondary, and incidental users of smart speakers. Finally, current smart speaker privacy controls are rarely used, as they are not well-aligned with users' needs. Our findings can inform future smart speaker designs; in particular we recommend better integrating privacy controls into smart speaker interaction.