Dr. Benjamin Cowan:

What is being discussed is how consent is gathered, and where it is informed consent that people are given all the risks before they purchase the devices, make the decision and then live by that. However, there may also be an issue of ongoing consent so that when something is inadvertently gathered, the system could alert that to the customer to that effect.

That is a decision the design teams could make at these companies on the basis that that is what they want in their interaction. One could have agents that diversify from the standards in the market by doing that. I do not want to speculate about why they are potentially not doing that, but there is a sense that we need to think a bit more like behavioural scientists when it comes to that issue. We are trying to get consent, not just at the start, so that people know what the systems do and how they are going to gather data. That is important, but also that it goes through the interaction, because these are in people's houses for not just a day or a week but potentially for years and years. The way that the data are being used may change. We need to have that element of dynamic consent as we go through, but that is a design choice as well as a legislation choice. Whether there needs to be legislation that says these companies must make users aware throughout the interaction, however which way they do that, that has to happen. That could be a way of doing it but then the companies then decide how that is done. It is not good to do it through a written description that someone has to look through, because people want to get that system set up so they just want to click on through.