This repository contains all code and files for the CHI'25 paper on "PrivacyHub: A Functional Tangible and Digital Ecosystem for Interoperable Smart Home Privacy Awareness and Control."
Hubs are at the core of most smart homes. Modern cross-ecosystem protocols and standards enable smart home hubs to achieve interoperability across devices, offering the unique opportunity to integrate universally available smart home privacy awareness and control features. To date, such privacy features mainly focus on individual products or prototypical research artifacts. We developed a cross-ecosystem hub featuring a tangible dashboard and a digital web application to deepen our understanding of how smart home users interact with functional privacy features. The ecosystem allows users to control the connectivity states of their devices and raises awareness by visualizing device positions, states, and data flows. We deployed the ecosystem in six households for one week and found that it increased participants' perceived control, awareness, and understanding of smart home privacy. We further found distinct differences between tangible and digital mechanisms. Our findings highlight the value of cross-ecosystem hubs for effective privacy management.
This repository contains the code and all other necessary files, as well as instructions on how to build the PrivacyHub ecosystem. Each submodule features its own README with a detailed description of its contents and how to utilize them.
This work can be cited as follows:
author = {Windl, Maximiliane and Thalhammer, Philipp and M{\"u}ller, David and Schmidt, Albrecht and Feger, S. Sebastian},
title = {PrivacyHub: A Functional Tangible and Digital Ecosystem for Interoperable Smart Home Privacy Awareness and Control},
year = {2025},
isbn = {979-8-4007-1394-1/25/04},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713517},
doi = {10.1145/3706598.3713517},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
numpages = {15},
location = {Japan},
series = {CHI '25}
}