A Focus Group Study of Privacy Concerns about Telepresence Robots

The advent of robotics technology raises new privacy concerns, but preliminary research in this area has not included members of the general public in the conversation. This study used three focus groups to see what types of privacy concerns would be mentioned by typical users and to see what other topics were deemed important by the participants. The conversations were based around three concrete scenarios involving telepresence robots: an in-home tele-maid, a boss attending a meeting via telepresence, and a medical roboceptionist. Codings of our transcripts yielded privacy-relevant concerns not yet categorized by the literature such as hacking, theft, embarrassment, and marketing. These findings will give privacy-sensitive robotics researchers (1) a more complete list of privacy categories to measure, (2) new research questions to pursue, and (3) privacy-enhancing design suggestions to test.