How to Increase Smart Home Security and Privacy Risk Perception

With continuous technological advancements, our homes become smarter by interconnecting more and more devices. Smart homes provide many advantages. However, they also introduce new privacy and security risks. Recent studies show that only a few people are aware of abstract risks, and most people are not aware of specific negative consequences. We developed a privacy and security awareness intervention for people who want to inform themselves about risks in the smart home context. Our intervention is based on research literature on risk perception and feedback from both lay users and security and privacy experts. We evaluated our intervention regarding its influence on participants' perceived threat, privacy attitude, motivation to avoid threats, willingness to pay, and time commitment to configure protective measures. The results of this evaluation show a significant increase for all these aspects. We also compared our intervention to information that users could obtain during an Internet search on the topic. In this comparison, our intervention evokes a significantly higher perceived threat and privacy attitude. It showed no significant difference for the other three scales. We discuss our findings in light of related work.