A study of ethical issues in developing smart-home technologies
Smart homes are nowadays popular. It’s the technology that interacts with the home occupier to remotely automate utilities and appliances. The development of such technology is usually justified on the basis of the technology’s potential to increase the autonomy of people living with long-term conditions. It might also raise concerns about privacy, consent, social isolation, and equity of access.
Background
With the rapid development of the Internet of Things, intelligent systems are increasingly finding their way into everyday life and into people’s homes.
The creation of inexpensive wireless devices and powerful computers means that many observers see smart-homes as an idea whose time has come. Interest in smart-homes extends beyond automation for convenience to healthcare applications for older people. Also, intelligent appliances in the home are no longer operated separately and locally. Increasingly, domestic appliances are mutually connected via information and communication technology, resulting in the emergence of smart homes. Devices like sensors on doors, furniture and appliances, wearable devices, and video cameras can make physiological measurements, detect activity and inactivity, falls, and other accidents. Combined, the information from such devices can track health-related routines of smart-home occupants by monitoring their patterns of daily living.
While more studies of smart-homes are focused on the possibilities of data collection than its ethical limits, researchers have tried to understand the ethical implications of smart-home and related health technologies. These studies commonly raise concerns about privacy, but also suggest consent, social isolation and equity of access are major areas of concern.
Ethical Analysis
Privacy
First and foremost, privacy concern is always a “volatile and controversial concept”. Unfortunately, based on the information online, it indicates the majority of the public are relaxed about their own privacy. People don’t seem to have a choice when they are using smart-home. Thinking of a general procedure of unboxing and using a new smart-home device. The first thing is to do is to agree with the term of use. Without the user agrees that, the device will not be usable. Consequently, most people will not take their time reading a list of extremely long and complex terms. Hence, it raises a major issue: The loss of privacy is a ‘done deal’, and therefore, not an important worry. People on the other hand feel relaxed about the large-scale commercial collection of their personal data.
If you use them you get a lot of benefit from having — and actually do I really care about what they’re doing with my data? It’s not like that they’re looking at my data personally.
Point of views like the response above conceptualize privacy as access to data and suggest the participants may not contextualize quite distant, person-neutral, corporate information collection as problematic in privacy terms. In the context of smart-homes, privacy is often considered in terms of data, rather than in more abstract terms, like being watched. With that, most smart-home users will not bother caring too much about their own privacy.
Choice
As a close connection to privacy, a concept that appears to be linked to notions of consent, choice emerges as a second major point. Researchers often appeal to end-user choice to solve the ethical dilemmas inherent in ensuring privacy. However, a commitment to end-user choice does not sit comfortably with researchers’ roles in defining the boundaries of these choices. Researchers’ discussion of their own choices, which implies certain moral standpoints, and how these might influence — or even constrain — the choices the end-users made, sometimes sharply contradict commitment to end-user choice.
A general and most common example might be the acceptability of recording video images. As we have seen resources online that collecting video was contentious among some smart home users because of privacy concerns, but a portion of developers in favor argued end-user choice could justify the collection of this type of data.
Some users might not even want the camera in their home, so we can’t put the whole thing in their homes. I think that really depends on what the user wants. If they said okay then we are happy to put it in.
The quotes from a developer exemplify a significant sentiment: ethical problems, especially of privacy, could potentially be dissolved if an end-user chose to share their data. Indeed, some researchers take the choice to imply responsibility.
However, when it comes to the special problems of dealing with multiple occupants and visitors, who might include children or non-consenting adults, it means that choice is much more dynamic than simply allowing individual end-users to choose their preference. On the other hand, even if there is clear evidence of particular end-user choices, these could not be unrestricted. Broadcast data would damage the end-user if shared in an unrestricted way.
Social isolation
Loneliness is a subjective feeling about the gap between a person’s desired levels of social contact and their actual level of social contact, while social isolation is defined by Age UK as an objective measure of the number of contacts that people have.
A number of passages argued that the smart-homes can effectively eliminate or minimize social isolation, especially in the group of older people. These smart homes can keep track of visitors and ensure that social contact is made. On the other hand, devices like Alexa allows users to access their community’s activities calendar, hear the news, listen to their favorite music and audiobooks, and set reminders to take their medications. Maybe just as important, the device allows users to bond with each other over the cool new things they discover it can do.
However, with all these positive characteristics of smart-homes. There are definitely underlying concerns. With these conveniences, there will be a portion of older people who choose not to interact with other people or the community, but fully rely on and interact with smart-home devices. It’ll lead to serious social isolation problems.
Conclusion
Applying smart-home technologies represents not only a technical, but an ethical challenge. Ethical analyses of these technologies raise concerns about loss of privacy, the adequacy of consent, and maintaining agency. From smart-home users’ perspective, the purpose of this article, as many analysis articles online, is to raise public awareness of the protection of privacy. Reminding people not to treat their own privacy as bare data with minimal importance. From the perspective of developers, they should be helping identify the moral issues, to help to resolve them, to point at issues that are intractable or difficult to resolve, and to find ethical justifications or express concerns. Such collaboration between ethics and engineering is necessary to develop solutions that are both technologically and ethically robust in an area that is quickly rising.
References
Brown, I., & Adams, A. A. (2007). The ethical challenges of ubiquitous healthcare. The International Review of Information Ethics, 8, 53–60.
Chung, J., Demiris, G., & Thompson, H. J. (2016). Ethical considerations regarding the use of smart home technologies for older adults: an integrative review. Annual review of nursing research, 34(1), 155–181.
Aldrich F. Smart homes: past, present and future. In: Harper R, editor. Inside the smart home. London: Springer Science & Business Media; 2006. p. 17–62.
Piau A, Campo E, Rumeau P, Vellas B, Nourhashemi F. Aging society and gerontechnology: a solution for an independent living? J Nutr Health Aging. 2014;18(1):97–112.
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