Access Control for Privacy-Conscious Social Robots: Findings From a Co-Design Study with Older Adults

Social robots—robots that are perceived as social entities and interact with humans socially—offer exciting possibilities to support the independent and healthy aging of older adults. Despite this, the intersection of privacy and social robotics remains highly under-researched. Consider a scenario where a third party approaches a social robot and queries it for private information about its user: what mechanism should govern the disclosures of the robot and allow it to recognize and prevent a potential privacy violation from occurring---without depriving it completely of its communicative ability? To work towards addressing these concerns, we investigated the design of an access control-based privacy mechanism for social robots as part of a longitudinal co-design study with older adults. In this poster, we present three tentative design factors for such a system, identified from our participants' contributions during our co-design study.