DESI Seminar: Foregrounding Bystanders as Stakeholders in Smart Home Product Design

We are excited to announce that Dr. Ruba Abu-Salma from King’s College London, will be delivering a seminar on Foregrounding Bystanders as Stakeholders in Smart Home Product Design.

Abstract: Smart home devices, such as security cameras and voice assistants, have seen widespread adoption due to the utility and convenience they offer to users. The deployment of these devices in homes, however, raises privacy concerns for bystanders—people who may not necessarily have a say in the deployment and configuration of these devices, and yet are exposed to or affected by their data collection. Examples of bystanders include guests, short-term tenants, and domestic workers.

In this talk, I will examine how smart home bystanders are defined and classified in the academic literature. I will then focus on one bystander group — domestic childcare workers — as a key case study, highlighting their privacy needs and concerns with regard to smart home technologies. Finally, I will propose technical and social interventions to mitigate the adverse effects of power imbalances in employer-employee relationships on domestic workers’ privacy and individual agency in smart homes.

The talk will be based on collaborative research published at ACM TOCHI, ACM CHI, USENIX Security, PoPETs, and SOUPS.

Short bio: Ruba Abu-Salma is a Lecturer in Computer Science at King’s College London. Ruba is affiliated with the Cybersecurity Group and Human-Centered Computing Group in the Department of Informatics. She is also the department’s Deputy Head of the Cybersecurity Group and Security Hub Co-Champion. Her research is interdisciplinary, sitting at the intersection of cybersecurity, privacy, human-computer interaction (HCI), emerging technologies, and public policy. She uses computational and social science methods to understand and improve people’s security, privacy, and safety decision-making processes, with a focus on at-risk populations. Her work has been published at top-tier venues, including IEEE S&P (Oakland), USENIX Security, ACM CHI, and ACM TOCHI, and has been featured in national and international media outlets such as BBC News, BBC Women’s Hour, Financial Times, The Register, Euronews, The New York Times, CNET, and Science News.

Before joining King’s in 2021, Ruba was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Usable Security and Privacy Group at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at the University of California, Berkeley, and in the PRIVATICS Team at INRIA Sophia Antipolis. Ruba defended her doctoral thesis in December 2019, earning a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University College London (UCL). Her dissertation focused on designing user-centered privacy-enhancing technologies. As a postgraduate student, she was supported by Google, a Marie-Skłodowska Curie Research Fellowship, and a Supporting Usability and Design in Security (SUDS) Fellowship from the Open Technology Fund (OTF). She also performed research at the Cambridge Cybercrime Center, Brave, and Telefónica Research.