What's up with Privacy?: User Preferences and Privacy Concerns in Intelligent Personal Assistants

Abstract: The recent breakthroughs in AI have allowed individuals to rely on automated systems for a variety of reasons. Some of these systems are the currently popular voice-enabled systems like Echo by Amazon and Home by Google that are also called as Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs). Though there are raising concerns about privacy and ethical implications, users of these IPAs seem to continue using these systems. We aim to investigate why users are concerned about privacy and how they are handling these concerns while using the IPAs. By utilizing the reviews posted online along with the responses to a survey, this paper provides a set of insights about the detected markers related to user interests and privacy challenges. The insights suggest that users of these systems irrespective of their concerns about privacy, are generally positive in terms of utilizing IPAs in their everyday lives. However, there is a significant percentage of users who are concerned about privacy and took further actions to address the related concerns. Some percentage of users expressed that they do not have any privacy concerns but when they learned about the "always listening" feature of these devices, their concern about privacy increased.