The focus of the paper was to conduct a scoping review to assess the scale and scope of technology facilitated abuse. The aim of the review is to gain a better understanding of the state of academic knowledge about the security and privacy risks and resulting harms associated with the smart home including the approaches and methods employed, gaps in knowledge and future research pathways. The study set out to understand the key harms and risks from a multidisciplinary perspective by mapping research concepts, ideas, definitions, sources, and categories of evidence representative of the multidisciplinary nature of smart home research.

The scoping review is steered by the 2005 Arksey and O’Malle five-step methodological framework to guide and inform each stage of the process. The stages comprised the following: identifying the research questions and relevant studies: selecting studies to be included in the review: charting the data; and then collating, summarising, and reporting the results. The process was reviewed and developed by a team of researchers with expertise in social science and humanities, human–computer interaction, business, and law. This team forms part of a broader multidisciplinary research group, ‘AGENCY: Assuring Citizen Agency in a World with Complex Online Harms’.

The broader research group advised on the objectives and research questions to guide the scoping review process, including search terms and keywords, synthesising and reporting findings, and databases.

Two questions guided the scoping review:

1. How is digital agency undermined and obtained in the smart home environment?
2. How are smart home harms / risks / vulnerabilities conceived and investigated in different disciplines of literature?