Be more transparent and users will like you: a robot privacy and user experience design experiment

Robots interacting with humans in public spaces often need to collect users' private information in order to provide the required services. Current privacy legislation in major jurisdictions requires organisations to disclose information about their data collection process and obtain user's consent prior to collecting privacy sensitive information. In this study, we consider a privacy-sensitive design of a data collection system for face identification. We deployed a face enrolment system on a humanoid robot with human-like gesturing and speech. We compared it with an equivalent system, in terms of capability and interactive process, on a screen-based interactive kiosk. In our previous contribution, we investigated the effects that embodiment has on users' privacy considerations. We found that an embodied humanoid robot is capable of collecting more private information from users in comparison to a disembodied interactive kiosk. However, this effect was statistically significant only when the two compared systems were using a transparent interface, i.e. an interface communicating to users the privacy policies for data processing and storage. Thus, in this work, we aim to further investigate the effects of transparency on users' privacy considerations and their experience with robot applications. We found that when comparing a non-transparent vs. transparent interface within the same system (i.e. on an embodied robot or on a disembodied kiosk) transparency does not lead to significant effects on users' privacy considerations. However, we found that transparency leads to a significantly better user experience for both systems. Therefore, our overall analyses suggest that both the interactive robot and the interactive kiosk are capable of enhancing the user experience by providing transparent information to users, which is required by privacy legislation. However, an interactive kiosk providing transparent information elicits significantly more privacy concerns in users as compared to the robot supplying the very same transparent information. This exploratory study provides conclusions that provide valuable insights for designing robot applications dealing with users privacy and it discusses the related legal implications, concluding with recommendations for privacy policymakers.