Scoping Review

The focus of the paper was to conduct a scooping 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 are smart home harms / risks / vulnerabilities conceived and investigated in different disciplines of literature?
2. How is digital agency undermined and obtained in the smart home environment?

Workshops

The Stakeholder Engagement Workshops are designed to explore and address the complex harms relating to smart home technology, with a focus on intimate partner tech abuse.

Workshop 1: The influences of smart technology device functions, and their security and privacy flaws, on household dynamics has only recently begun to receive scholarly, legal and policy interest in the UK. Academic and policy discussions have centred on the potential vulnerabilities, risks and harms occasioned by smart home devices. The smart home case study adopts an interdisciplinary approach to understand the role of smart homes devices and household dynamics by drawing on approaches in sociology, computer science, security studies, business, and law. The use of qualitative methods enables the research team to gain in-depth understanding of victim-survivor’s experiences of smart home harms by drawing on the perspective of expert stakeholders in support services. The goal to offers great potential to empower householders, boosting agency and autonomy especially for victims-survivors of technology abuse in the home.

With a focus on tech abuse as one of the most rapidly escalating types of smart home harm, we have focused group-styled workshops method to investigate the nature, intensions, and processes of such harms. This method enables the team to co-research with expert stakeholders to gather information from participants and stakeholders who have professional knowledge of working with the victim / survivors of smart home enabled intimate partner abuse. Co-researching is used as a participatory approach allowing victim-survivors and professional support services opportunity to participate in face-to-face focus-group styled workshops to understand their experience tech abuse and solutions.

The smart home case study is guided by research questions boarding on (a) the susceptible of smart home devices to harm, (b) contexts and characteristics of smart-enabled domestic intimate partner abuse, (c) autonomy, control, or agency manifested in smart home devices (d) counter-harm and harm reducing tools and (e) design and policy solutions to combat smart-enabled intimate partner abuse in the home.

Our workshop participants are representatives from stakeholder organisations including charities, NGOs, researchers working directly with victim-survivors and those with lived experience of tech abuse. Stakeholders formed groups within panels in breakout sessions to highlight the key issues and potential socio-technical redress to remedy smart-enabled abuse because of device vulnerabilities, risks, and harms.

During the project, three workshops were held with stakeholders. Participants were asked to consider ways to mitigate the harms cause to householders, associated with the security vulnerabilities of smart home technologies. Fifteen participants attended Workshop 1, which focused on design and policy strategies. The participants were drawn from academic researchers in the fields of computer science, law, human computer interaction (HCI), and communication studies, as well as representatives of UK domestic abuse support services with cyber abuse expertise from charities and third sector organisations.

Workshop 2: A second workshop hosted ten participants which focused only on policy questions and implications. These participants included advocates for digital inclusion, policymaking specialists, and UK support service personnel with knowledge of cyber abuse. A thematic analysis of the workshop discussions is presented based on the framework developed by Braun and Clark (2006).

Workshop 3: The third workshop used storyboarding techniques drawn from Human Computer Interactions in which participants including persons with lived experience and a narrative and idiographic approach stakeholders drawn professional support services and researcher mapped scenarios using codesign as a knowledge gathering approach towards design solutions collaboratively with designers. Tremblay et al (2022) explain that the significance of the codesign approach lies in the participation of end users of a product in knowledge creation and idea generation together with researchers and designers. This approach enabled design ideation to mitigate risks, vulnerabilities and harms related to tech abuse in the smart home devices ecosystem. Participants in this workshop also served as key data sources.

Activities in the workshop were designed to immerse participants within the context of the smart home ecosystem. Participants were provided photographic materials of key smart home devices implicated in harms within the home and based on the literature and evidence from the first workshops. This allowed them to reflect on their encounters and experience with smart home devices. Participants then mapped scenarios by creating personas indicative of their experience of tech abuse in three groups led by expert stakeholders and facilitated by the lead researchers on the project.

These activities informed discussions critically assessing the vulnerabilities within the home space. Similarly, the mapping exercise by stakeholders informed the creation of socio-technical recommendations in this workshop with broader discussions among the team of researchers.

Thematic Analysis: A reflexive thematic analysis was employed to map and report findings from the workshops. A reflexive thematic analysis framework prescribed by Braun and Clark (Braun and Clarke 2006; 2019; 2021; Byrne 2021) was followed. The reflexive thematic analytical process enables the finding and analysis of patterns and themes in each set of data in a theoretically adaptable, interpretive qualitative method to data analysis. Informed by the thematic analysis approach, the researcher played an integral role in the knowledge production process of the analysis. The analytical process involved in thematic analysis is influenced by certain considerations including the dataset, theoretical assumptions, and the skills/resources available to the researcher.

The reflexive process is iterative and collaborative involving sense-checking ideas and exploring assumptions regarding the data among researchers. Data analysis followed the Braun and Clarke 2006 thematic analysis guide including:

• Familiarising with the data
• Coding
• Identifying initial themes
• Reviewing themes
• Defining themes, and
• Writing up for publication.

Ultimately, the smart home case study combines methods used in the projects including systematic scooping literature research to provide an overview of existing research and co-design and co-researching with expert stakeholder in focus group styled workshops together with a reflexive thematic analysis.

LLM on IP Cam

Placeholder (Maryam) 

Smart Devices Analysis

Placeholder (Scott / Ehsan) 

Computer Simulations

Placeholder (David, Han) 

• Federated Learning