Article published In: Social Cues in Robot Interaction, Trust and Acceptance
Edited by Alessandra Rossi, Kheng Lee Koay, Silvia Moros, Patrick Holthaus and Marcus Scheunemann
[Interaction Studies 20:3] 2019
► pp. 509–529
Privacy-centered design for social robots
Published online: 18 November 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/is.18063.heu
https://doi.org/10.1075/is.18063.heu
Abstract
Social robots as companions play an increasingly important role in our everyday life. However, reaching the full
potential of social robots and the interaction between humans and robots requires permanent collection and processing of personal
data of users, e.g. video and audio data for image and speech recognition. In order to foster user acceptance, trust and to
address legal requirements as the General Data Protection Regulation of the EU, privacy needs to be integrated in the design
process of social robots. The Privacy by Design approach by Cavoukian indicates the relevance of a privacy-respecting development
and outlines seven abstract principle.
In this paper two methods as a hands-on guideline to fulfill the principles are presented and discussed in the
content of the Privacy by Design approach. Privacy risks of a typical robot scenario are identified, analyzed and solutions are
proposed on the basis of the seven types of privacy and the privacy protection goals.
Article outline
- Introduction
- Related work
- Methodology
- Risk identification – seven types of privacy
- Risk analysis – privacy protection goals
- Risk mitigation
- Use case
- Risk identification
- Risk analysis
- Risk mitigation
- Discussion
- Future work
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
References
References (33)
Alaiad, A., & Zhou, L. (2014). The determinants of home healthcare robots adoption: An empirical investigation. International journal of medical informatics, 83(11), 825–840.
Broadbent, E., Stafford, R., & MacDonald, B. (2009). Acceptance of healthcare robots for the older population: Review and future directions. International Journal of Social Robotics, 1 (4), 319.
Butler, D. J., Huang, J., Roesner, F., & Cakmak, M. (2015). The privacy-utility tradeoff for remotely teleoperated robots. In Proceedings of the tenth annual ACM/IEEE international conference on human-robot interaction (pp. 27–34). ACM.
Caine, K., Šabanovic, S., & Carter, M. (2012). The effect of monitoring by cameras and robots on the privacy enhancing behaviors of older adults, 343–350.
Caine, K. E., Zimmerman, C. Y., Schall-Zimmerman, Z., Hazlewood, W. R., Camp, L. J., Connelly, K. H., … Shankar, K. (2011). Digiswitch: A device to allow older adults to monitor and direct the collection and transmission of health information collected at home. Journal of medical systems, 35(5), 1181–1195.
Cavoukian, A., et al. (2009). Privacy by design: The 7 foundational principles. Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, Canada, 51.
Denning, T., Matuszek, C., Koscher, K., Smith, J. R., & Kohno, T. (2009). A spotlight on security and privacy risks with future household robots: attacks and lessons. In Proceedings of the 11th international conference on ubiquitous computing (pp. 105–114). ACM.
Finn, R. L., Wright, D., & Friedewald, M. (2013). Seven types of privacy. In European data protection: coming of age (pp. 3–32). Springer.
Gould, J. D., & Lewis, C. (1985). Designing for usability: key principles and what designers think. Communications of the ACM, 28(3), 300–311.
Grönvall, E., & Kyng, M. (2013). On participatory design of home-based healthcare. Cognition, technology & work, 15(4), 389–401.
Hansen, M., Jensen, M., & Rost, M. (2015). Protection goals for privacy engineering. In Security and privacy workshops (spw), 2015 IEEE (pp. 159–166). IEEE.
Heuer, T., Schiering, I., & Gerndt, R. (2019). Me and my robot – sharing information with a new friend. In Privacy and identity management. fairness, accountability and transparency in the age of big data. ifip advances in information and communication technology. Springer (to appear).
Hong, J. I., Ng, J. D., Lederer, S., & Landay, J. A. (2004). Privacy risk models for designing privacy-sensitive ubiquitous computing systems. In Proceedings of the 5th conference on designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques (pp. 91–100). ACM.
Hubers, A., Andrulis, E., Scott, W. D., Scott, L., Stirrat, T., Tran, D., … Grimm, C. (2015). Video Manipulation Techniques for the Protection of Privacy in Remote Presence Systems. Proceedings of the Tenth Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction Extended Abstracts – HRI’15 Extended Abstracts, 59–60. Retrieved from [URL]
Iachello, G., & Hong, J. (2007). End-User Privacy in Human-Computer Interaction. Foundations and Trends® in Human-Computer Interaction, 1 (1), 1–137. Retrieved from [URL]
International Federation of Robotics. (2018). Executive summary world robotics 2018 service robots. Retrieved from [URL]
Jana, S., Narayanan, A., & Shmatikov, V. (2013). A scanner darkly: Protecting user privacy from perceptual applications. Proceedings – IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 349–363.
Kitahara, I., Kogure, K., & Hagita, N. (2004). Stealth vision for protecting privacy. Proceedings – International Conference on Pattern Recognition, 41, 404–407.
Lee, H. R., Šabanović, S., Chang, W.-L., Nagata, S., Piatt, J., Bennett, C., & Hakken, D. (2017). Steps toward participatory design of social robots: Mutual learning with older adults with depression. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM/IEEE international conference on human-robot interaction (pp. 244–253). ACM.
Lee, M. K., Tang, K. P., Forlizzi, J., & Kiesler, S. (2011). Understanding Users’ Perception of Privacy in Human-Robot Interaction. HRI ’11 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Human-robot interaction, 181–182. Retrieved from [URL]
Leenes, R., Palmerini, E., Koops, B.-J., Bertolini, A., Salvini, P., & Lucivero, F. (2017). Regulatory challenges of robotics: some guidelines for addressing legal and ethical issues. Law, Innovation and Technology, 9(1), 1–44.
Lera, F. J. R., Llamas, C. F., Guerrero, Á. M., & Olivera, V. M. (2017). Cybersecurity of robotics and autonomous systems: Privacy and safety. In Robotics-legal, ethical and socioeconomic impacts. In Tech..
Pagallo, U. (2013). Robots in the cloud with privacy: A new threat to data protection? Computer Law and Security Review, 29(5), 501–508.
Raval, N., Srivastava, A., Lebeck, K., Cox, L., & Machanavajjhala, A. (2014). Markit: Privacy markers for protecting visual secrets. In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM international joint conference on pervasive and ubiquitous computing: Adjunct publication (pp. 1289–1295). ACM.
Regulation (eu) 2016/679 of the european parliament and of the council of 27 april 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing directive 95/46/ec (general data protection eegulation). (n.d.)., 1–88.
Šabanović, S., Chang, W.-L., Bennett, C. C., Piatt, J. A., & Hakken, D. (2015). A robot of my own: participatory design of socially assistive robots for independently living older adults diagnosed with depression. In International conference on human aspects of it for the aged population (pp. 104–114). Springer.
Siljee, J. (2015). Privacy transparency patterns. In Proceedings of the 20th european conference on pattern languages of programs (pp. 52:1–52:11). New York, NY, USA: ACM. Retrieved from
Syrdal, D. S., Walters, M. L., Otero, N., Koay, K. L., & Dautenhahn, K. (2007). He knows when you are sleeping-privacy and the personal robot companion. In Proc. workshop human implications of human-robot interaction, association for the advancement of artificial intelligence (aaai’07) (pp. 28–33).
Tobe, F. (2017). Robotics industry growing faster than expected. Retrieved from [URL]
Vargas, P. A., Ho, W. C., Lim, M., Enz, S., & Aylett, R. (2009). To forget or not to forget: towards a roboethical memory control. Killer Robots or Friendly Fridges: the Social Understanding of Artificial Intelligence, AISB, 91, 18–23.
Yong, S., Lindskog, D., Ruhl, R., & Zavarsky, P. (2011). Risk mitigation strategies for mobile wi-fi robot toys from online pedophiles. In Privacy, security, risk and trust (passat) and 2011 IEEE third inernational conference on social computing (socialcom), 2011 IEEE third international conference on (pp. 1220–1223). IEEE.
Cited by (22)
Cited by 22 other publications
Abbasi, Nida Itrat, Leigh Levinson, Selma Šabanović & Hatice Gunes
Altintas, Murat Hakan, Can Efecan Akhan & Burcu Yalcin
Ahtinen, Aino, Salla Jarske, Aparajita Chowdhury, Hilla Kiuru, Paula Vasara, Heli Valokivi, Harri Siirtola & Roope Raisamo
Alenljung, Beatrice, Erik Billing & Catharina Gillsjö
Augustine, Angelika & Friederike Eyssel
Collins, Sawyer, Čedomir Stanojević, Casey Bennett, Zachary Henkel, Kenna Baugus Henkel, Nikki M. Abbott, Cindy L. Bethel & Selma Śabanović
Jiang, Xiaocong & Tianyang Luo
Parts, Joosep, Janika Leoste, Kalle Tammemäe & Slavko Rakic
Reinhardt, Delphine & Archan Misra
Vozna, Alina & Stefania Costantini
Helgert, André, Lukas Erle, Sabrina Langer, Carolin Straßmann & Sabrina C. Eimler
Jain, Pranut, Andrew Xu, Thomas Downes, Injung Kim, Talha Khan, Jacob T. Biehl & Adam J. Lee
Neumann, Paul, Sebastian Thomas Büttner, Luca Hernández Acosta, Delphine Reinhardt & Michael Prilla
Song, Bo, Hongda Xu, Wenna Hu, Yi Li & Yingzhi Guo
Williams, Tom
Ahtinen, Aino, Nasim Beheshtian & Kaisa Väänänen
Ahtinen, Aino, Aparajita Chowdhury, Valentina Ramírez Millan, Chia-Hsin Wu & Gayathri Menon
Dietrich, Manuel, Matti Krüger & Thomas H. Weisswange
Heuer, Tanja & Ina Schiering
Song, Bo, Meng Zhang & Peipei Wu
Heuer, Tanja, Ina Schiering & Reinhard Gerndt
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 17 march 2026. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.