Smart speakers pose privacy risks to users and bystanders. We do not know how these risks are perceived depending on different factors, such as the potential privacy violators, the nature of the privacy violation, the different user groups, and culture. Understanding these perceptions is crucial to providing adequate privacy solutions and legislation. To this end, 1,768 participants from Germany and the UK answered our online-questionnaire about their perceptions of five different actors’ possibilities , intentions , and legal bases to commit five privacy violations: data access, data inference, overhearing conversations, secondary use, and passing data along. Participants expressed mild concerns about the main user but greater worry about manufacturers and the state. We observe growing concern among younger people, especially in the UK and that users who do not own the smart speaker are the least concerned group. Our approach can be used to better differentiate perceptions of concerns in other contexts.

According to the European General Data Protection Regulation and the principle of Privacy-by-design developers should embed methods of privacy protection into their projects at an early stage. However, studies show that developers are either lacking the tools or the training to apply the appropriate methods. Hence, to ensure the development of privacy-preserving software it is important to understand developers’ issues with methods of privacy-preserving computation. To this end, we have sent a questionnaire to 407 participants with diverse backgrounds to investigate their perceptions of privacy in general and of the methods k-anonymity, differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, and secure multi-party computation in particular. We compared the results to developers’ issues on Stack Overflow. We observe that raising the awareness about these methods increases developers’ willingness to use them in the future. We also validate previously known privacy-related issues developers face. Including privacy-preserving methods in programming education and, thereby, raising developers’ awareness could therefore enhance the privacy protection of software products.