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Maximiliane Windl, Philipp Thalhammer, David Mueller, Albrecht Schmidt, Sebastian Feger
PrivacyHub: A Functional Tangible and Digital Ecosystem for Interoperable Smart Home Privacy Awareness and Control
In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM. Yokohama, Japan. 26 April 2025- 1 May 2025.https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3706598 (bib)

Hubs are at the core of most smart homes. Modern cross-ecosystem protocols and standards enable smart home hubs to achieve interoperability across devices, offering the unique opportunity to integrate universally available smart home privacy awareness and control features. To date, such privacy features mainly focus on individual products or prototypical research artifacts. We developed a cross-ecosystem hub featuring a tangible dashboard and a digital web application to deepen our understanding of how smart home users interact with functional privacy features. The ecosystem allows users to control the connectivity states of their devices and raises awareness by visualizing device positions, states, and data flows. We deployed the ecosystem in six households for one week and found that it increased participantsâ perceived control, awareness, and understanding of smart home privacy. We further found distinct differences between tangible and digital mechanisms. Our findings highlight the value of cross-ecosystem hubs for effective privacy management.