VBIT: Towards Enhancing Privacy Control Over IoT Devices

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are increasingly deployed at home, at work, and in other shared and public spaces. IoT devices collect and share data with service providers and third parties, which poses privacy concerns. Although privacy-enhancing tools are quite advanced in other application domains (e.g., advertising and tracker blockers for browsers), users currently have no convenient way to know or manage the data that is collected and shared by IoT devices. In order to understand what users expect from such tools, we present and evaluate VBIT , an interactive system combining Mixed Reality (MR) and web-based applications that allows users to: (1) uncover and visualize tracking services by IoT devices in an instrumented space and (2) take action to stop or limit that tracking. We design and implement VBIT to operate at the network traffic level, and we show that it has negligible performance overhead and offers both flexibility and good usability. We perform a mixed-method user study consisting of an online survey and an in-person interview study. We show that users appreciate transparency, control, and customization features, and they become significantly more willing to install an IoT advertising and tracking blocker, as demonstrated by their experience using VBIT . We also obtain design insights that can be used to further iterate and improve the design of VBIT and other systems for IoT transparency and control.