View article

Smart Home Speakers (SHSs) are becoming a part of family lives. Parents use them to engage children and to simplify their own everyday demanding schedules. For SHSs to provide the intended benefits, data are collected and can be shared with the device’s provider. Families, thus, must make decisions about the device’s privacy settings and usage in the home, and these information disclosure decisions affect the whole family. Drawing on multilevel information privacy and family technology usage research, this study seeks to understand how family members reconcile their individual information privacy views over time when using a shared technology. We conducted a longitudinal grounded theory study with 12 families consisting of three sets of interviews. We developed a model of how families decide about usage of and disclosure of information to shared technologies like a SHS, which can guide future research on information disclosure decisions for shared technologies in collective units.