First Paper Friday: Airbnb guests want privacy, not payouts

University of Michigan School of Information doctoral student Zixin Wang has published her first authored paper as a UMSI student. The paper examines how Airbnb guests address the privacy concerns of camera-equipped smart home devices in short-term rentals.

Wang’s paper, “Exploring Privacy Negotiation Strategies for Camera-Equipped Smart Home Devices in Airbnb,” was published in the proceedings of the 35th USENIX Security Symposium. It shows that, given the choice between physically adjusting a device to protect their privacy or receiving financial compensation, Airbnb guests prefer to protect their privacy.

The publication of a PhD student’s first paper is a big milestone in their career, initiating them into the scholarly community as producers of knowledge. 

In the paper, Wang examines privacy negotiation: the ways people communicate and reach agreements about how smart devices collect their data. Smart home devices are often controlled by their owners, leaving guests, workers and bystanders with limited ways to express their privacy concerns or change a device’s settings.

Wang and her co-authors focused on Airbnb rentals, where hosts control the devices and guests may be uncertain about what information is being collected and why. The researchers surveyed 400 people with recent Airbnb experience, asking them to evaluate different ways guests and hosts might address privacy concerns involving camera-equipped smart devices.

Across the scenarios, participants preferred physical adjustments such as covering or repositioning a device over receiving a partial refund. 

“Monetary compensation does not resolve the underlying privacy issue,” Wang says. “Participants preferred physical adjustments because those changes directly addressed their concerns.”

The paper found that negotiations involving an outdoor driveway camera were evaluated more favorably than those involving indoor devices, suggesting that people are more accepting of sensing when a device's purpose is explicit. 

Researchers recommend that short-term-rental platforms provide clearer device disclosures, standardized tools for requesting privacy protections and guest-accessible controls. These might include camera covers, power switches, temporary guest modes or ways to verify that a device has been disabled. Platforms could also confirm when data collected during a stay has been deleted.

Wang is a third-year PhD student at UMSI. She earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Southwest University and a master’s degree in psychology from Zhejiang University in China.

Her path to information science began with an interest in understanding people’s behaviors, attitudes and intentions. During her master’s program, she became interested in human-computer interaction and began researching privacy issues involving smart home devices.

Wang’s interest in the topic was also personal. A longtime fan of smart home technology, she built her own collection of connected devices and began thinking more deeply about the privacy concerns surrounding them.

Wang is now expanding her research toward human-centered security for artificial intelligence, including how people decide what information to disclose to conversational AI and how emerging AI agents can be designed to better protect users.

Her doctoral advisors are UMSI associate professors Florian Schaub and Chris Brooks. At UMSI, Wang values its interdisciplinary culture, its connections with other units across the university and the support she receives from fellow PhD students.

“UMSI is very open and interdisciplinary,” she says. “My cohort supports one another’s research ideas, and the school gives me the resources to pursue the projects I care about.”

Read “Exploring Privacy Negotiation Strategies for Camera-Equipped Smart Home Devices in Airbnb” in the proceedings of the 35th USENIX Security Symposium. See the abstract below:

Privacy conflicts among multiple users are prevalent in smart environments. To address such conflicts and mitigate the privacy concerns of bystanders, privacy negotiation has been proposed as a promising approach. Yet it remains unclear what makes such negotiations accessible to tenants. In this paper, using camera-equipped smart devices in Airbnb as a case, we explored different privacy negotiation strategies to shed light on future designs to support such actions. We developed 24 storyboards varying four factors, including device types (e.g., driveway camera, video conferencing device for TVs, smart display device), negotiation initiators (host vs. tenant), strategies (physical adjustment vs. monetary compensation), and outcomes (accepted vs. declined). Then, using a vignette survey study (N = 400), we find that device type and strategy significantly shape evaluations: physical adjustment was consistently preferred over monetary compensation, and driveway camera negotiations were evaluated more favorably than those involving indoor devices (video conferencing device for TVs, smart display device). We summarize design implications to support privacy negotiations.

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Learn more about Zixin Wang’s research interests by visiting her UMSI profile. 

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