Can you meaningfully consent in eight seconds? Identifying Ethical Issues with Verbal Consent for Voice Assistants

TY - CHAP

T1 - Can you meaningfully consent in eight seconds? Identifying Ethical Issues with Verbal Consent for Voice Assistants

AU - Seymour, William

AU - Coté, Mark

AU - Such, Jose

N1 - Funding Information: This work is funded by the Secure AI Assistants project via Grant EP/T026723/1 from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 ACM.

PY - 2022/7/26

Y1 - 2022/7/26

N2 - Determining how voice assistants should broker consent to share data with third party software has proven to be a complex problem. Devices often require users to switch to companion smartphone apps in order to navigate permissions menus for their otherwise hands-free voice assistant. More in line with smartphone app stores, Alexa now offers "voice-forward consent", allowing users to grant skills access to personal data mid-conversation using speech. While more usable and convenient than opening a companion app, asking for consent 'on the fly' can undermine several concepts core to the informed consent process. The intangible nature of voice interfaces further blurs the boundary between parts of an interaction controlled by third-party developers from the underlying platforms. This provocation paper highlights key issues with current verbal consent implementations, outlines directions for potential solutions, and presents five open questions to the research community. In so doing, we hope to help shape the development of usable and effective verbal consent for voice assistants and similar conversational user interfaces.

AB - Determining how voice assistants should broker consent to share data with third party software has proven to be a complex problem. Devices often require users to switch to companion smartphone apps in order to navigate permissions menus for their otherwise hands-free voice assistant. More in line with smartphone app stores, Alexa now offers "voice-forward consent", allowing users to grant skills access to personal data mid-conversation using speech. While more usable and convenient than opening a companion app, asking for consent 'on the fly' can undermine several concepts core to the informed consent process. The intangible nature of voice interfaces further blurs the boundary between parts of an interaction controlled by third-party developers from the underlying platforms. This provocation paper highlights key issues with current verbal consent implementations, outlines directions for potential solutions, and presents five open questions to the research community. In so doing, we hope to help shape the development of usable and effective verbal consent for voice assistants and similar conversational user interfaces.

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85139199431&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1145/3543829.3544521

DO - 10.1145/3543829.3544521

M3 - Conference paper

T3 - ACM International Conference Proceeding Series

BT - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces, CUI 2022

PB - ACM

ER -