Exploring Tenants’ Preferences of Privacy Negotiation in Airbnb

Literature suggests unmatched or conflicting privacy needs between users and bystanders in smart homes due to their different privacy concerns and priorities. A promising approach to mitigate such conflicts is through negotiation. Yet, it is unclear whether bystanders have privacy negotiation needs and, if so, what factors may influence their negotiation intention and how to better support the negotiation to achieve their privacy goals. In this paper, we investigate these questions in the context of Airbnb, a special case where tenants can be considered bystanders. We conducted a vignette study that varied across three categorical factors, including smart home device types, device location, and duration of stay, with 867 participants in the context of Airbnb. We further examined our participants’ preferences regarding with whom, when, how, and why they would like to negotiate their privacy. Our findings showed that device type remained the only factor that significantly influenced our participants’ negotiation intention. Additionally, we found our participants’ other preferences, such as contacting Airbnb hosts first to convey their privacy needs through asynchronous channels (e.g., messages and emails). We summarized design implications to fulfill tenants’ privacy negotiation needs.