Understanding factors behind IoT privacy – A user's perspective on RF sensors

While IoT sensors in physical spaces have provided utility and comfort in our lives, their instrumentation in private and personal spaces has led to growing concerns regarding privacy. The existing notion behind IoT privacy is that the sensors whose data can easily be understood and interpreted by humans (such as cameras) are more privacy-invasive than sensors that are not human-understandable, such as RF (radio-frequency) sensors. However, given recent advancements in machine learning, we can not only make sensitive inferences on RF data but also translate between modalities. Thus, the existing notions of privacy for IoT sensors need to be revisited. In this paper, our goal is to understand what factors affect the privacy notions of a non-expert user (someone who is not well-versed in privacy concepts). To this regard, we conduct an online study of 162 participants from the USA to find out what factors affect the privacy perception of a user regarding an RF-based device or a sensor. Our findings show that a user's perception of privacy not only depends upon the data collected by the sensor but also on the inferences that can be made on that data, familiarity with the device and its form factor as well as the control a user has over the device design and its data policies. When the data collected by the sensor is not human-interpretable, it is the inferences that can be made on the data and not the data itself that users care about when making informed decisions regarding device privacy.