More than just informed: The importance of consent facets in smart homes

Data collection without proper consent is a growing concern as smart home devices gain prevalence. It is especially difficult to obtain consent from incidental users because they may be unaware or feel pressured to consent. To understand what appropriate consent means in smart homes, we conducted an online survey (N=360) covering 6 common consent facets: freely given, revertible, informed, enthusiastic, specific, and unburdensome. We study how these facets affect perceived acceptability of data collection and how users would allocate responsibility for obtaining consent. Our results show that all facets have meaningful impacts on perceived acceptability of data collection, and eroding freely given had the greatest impact. Device owners were considered the most responsible for obtaining consent. Based on these findings, we provide recommendations for users, device manufacturers, and policymakers to improve consent practices in smart homes, such as designing consent interfaces that prioritize multiple facets of consent.