Framing Effects on Privacy Concerns about a Home Telepresence Robot

• Published in: 2017 12th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI pp. 435 - 444
• Main Authors: Rueben, Matthew, Bernieri, Frank J., Grimm, Cindy M., Smart, William D.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 06-03-2017
• Series: ACM Conferences
• Subjects: Animation; Computer systems organization > Embedded and cyber-physical systems > Robotics; Privacy; Psychology; Robot sensing systems; Security and privacy > Human and societal aspects of security and privacy; Telepresence; Videos; context; human-robot interaction; privacy; frames
• ISBN: 9781450343367; 1450343368
• ISSN: 2167-2148
• DOI: 10.1145/2909824.3020218

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.