Investigating Limits and Effectiveness of Privacy Conversations: the Case of Service Robots in an Office Environment

Social robots, capable of moving and acting autonomously in spaces inhabited by humans, are becoming more and more a reality. From a privacy-sensitive design perspective, and compared to digital technology, robots present additional challenges, as they are equipped with many sensors to acquire data to move around autonomously and interact with their users. This may raise privacy concerns and privacy conversations have been proposed as a means to address such concerns. In this paper we present a study of the effectiveness of such conversations, the topics addressed and the types of questions asked. Our findings illustrate the potential of such conversations with an embodied, or, with a virtual agent, according to the user convenience and type of inquiry. They also illustrate a variety of conversation styles. These positive results are counterbalanced by current technical limitations of conversational agents. They also show that in some cases conversations with humans are preferred.