Amazon’s settlement of over $30 million for privacy violations involving its Alexa voice assistant and Ring cameras highlights how neglecting human values in smart home platforms can cause financial, reputational, and societal harm. This study examines how potential violations of human values are reflected in everyday use of smart home apps. We analyze app reviews of three major smart home platforms – Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and Samsung SmartThings – to reveal firsthand accounts of design choices that affect user values. Using a large language model (LLM), we infer structured scenarios, referred to as value concerns, that explain how and why potential value violations arise. These concerns are refined for consistency and assessed by evaluators from computing and social sciences for factuality, plausibility, and specificity. Our analysis uncovers recurring mechanisms by which smart home app designs can impact a wide range of human values, offering practical insights to mitigate these impacts.
Paper
The full text of this publication is not hosted on 44B due to licensing.
Read it at OpenAlex