Vision: Why Johnny Can’t Configure Smart Home? A Behavioural Framework for Smart Home Privacy Configuration

Despite the advancements in smart technologies, the lack of user awareness of the capabilities of IoT smart home devices can expose them to privacy breaches. For example, a user may be unaware that their smart home devices are recording and storing their conversations (e.g. personal, perhaps sensitive or confidential communications). It could be argued that this is due to the lack of users’ threat perceptions and the challenges of altering existing (smart home) configuration behaviours. Therefore, we propose a behavioural framework to enhance users’ smart home configuration behaviours through their motivation. To develop the framework, we derived and extended the elements from the Technology Threat Avoidance Theory (TTAT) and Fogg’s Behavioural Motivation (FBM) model. The elements of the proposed framework were incorporated into an application scenario, i.e. a game design. The designed gaming application aims to educate users about smart home device capabilities and enhance their configuration behaviour through motivation. More research is required to evaluate the proposed framework and its gaming application scenario through empirical investigations.