Framing Effects on Privacy Concerns about a Home Telepresence Robot

Privacy-sensitive robotics is an emerging area of HRI research. Judgments about privacy would seem to be context-dependent, but none of the promising work on contextual "frames" has focused on privacy concerns. This work studies the impact of contextual "frames" on local users' privacy judgments in a home telepresence setting. Our methodology consists of using an online questionnaire to collect responses to animated videos of a telepresence robot after framing people with an introductory paragraph. The results of four studies indicate a large effect of manipulating the robot operator's identity between a stranger and a close confidante. It also appears that this framing effect persists throughout several videos. These findings serve to caution HRI researchers that a change in frame could cause their results to fail to replicate or generalize. We also recommend that robots be designed to encourage or discourage certain frames.

A Taxonomy of Privacy Constructs for Privacy-Sensitive Robotics

The introduction of robots into our society will also introduce new concerns about personal privacy. In order to study these concerns, we must do human-subject experiments that involve measuring privacy-relevant constructs. This paper presents a taxonomy of privacy constructs based on a review of the privacy literature. Future work in operationalizing privacy constructs for HRI studies is also discussed.