Amelia Smith
Pronouns: She/her
Research Mentor(s): Kaiwen Sun, Graduate Student Research Assistant (2nd year doctoral student)
Research Mentor School/College/Department: School of Information,
Presentation Date: Thursday, April 22, 2021
Session: Session 3 (1pm-1:50pm)
Breakout Room: Room 3
Presenter: 6
Abstract
With the prevalence of smart home devices in family homes, children are impacted in different aspects regarding their privacy, security, safety, well-being, routine, etc. To better understand how parents react to and mediate these potential smart home impacts on children, we conducted interviews with 23 parents, with children from ages 1 to 10, to ask them a series of questions about smart home devices within their houses. We present findings on the factors that lead parents to enable parental controls on devices or to leave them be depending on children’s level of access to smart home technologies and the parent’s view of technology. We found that parents who opt to not activate parental controls tend to view technology more as a toy and give their children more access to technology in general. Our findings provide design and policy implications for tech companies and policymakers to better consider children as important stakeholders of smart home technologies.
Authors: Amelia Smith, Kaiwen Sun
Research Method: Data Collection and Analysis
