Dr. Benjamin Cowan:

The users with which we do research are quite aware of this. It is a significant issue about which they are concerned. Whether it acts a barrier to them using or stopping to use the technology is an open question. There is a sense of there being an awareness of being monitored based on the clicks they make and the voice aspects of technology in respect of interactions so there is awareness on the part of some users but it is not universal.

There definitely does need to be more information about that and it needs to be much more upfront. Removing my voice assistant researcher hat and putting on my behaviour change researcher hat, it is not just about information, it is about when the information is delivered. The action is to be made when someone is to interact or someone is to decide that they are going to let this system gather a piece of data they may not want it to gather. We need to figure that out and identify what mechanism we need to have a person make an informed decision based on that, at the point the decision is being made. That is a design problem as well as a problem of understanding what the interaction is. It is about how we design that more effectively, thinking about nudge and behaviour change-based technologies. That is what many of the tech companies are using to gather this data and to get us to purchase new things and more stuff. They are using nudge-based techniques so potentially we should be using nudge-based techniques for privacy as well.