Dr. Convenience Love or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love my Voice Assistant

This paper explores the relationship between privacy concerns from voice assistant (VA) users and their persistent dependence on these devices for convenience. To gain a deeper understanding, we investigated using two studies. In the first study, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 13 participants, applying the lens of system justification theory. This approach enabled us to discover the cognitive and psychological mechanisms that people use when rationalizing and justifying their privacy versus convenience trade-off when using a VA. In the second study, we deployed VoxMox, a provotype, in three households. Our objective was to prompt participants to reflect more deeply on their privacy rationalizations and justifications, potentially motivating them to take action. Overall, our findings from both studies revealed several instances of apathetic attitudes toward privacy. We discuss privacy apathy in relation to the existing literature and offer research and design implications for breaking these attitudes in future studies.