Communicating Privacy: User Priorities for Privacy Requirements in Home Energy Applications

Perceived privacy plays a crucial role in the acceptance of technologies that rely on sensitive data. To mitigate concerns and build trust, privacy must not only be protected, but this protection should also be successfully communicated. Residential energy consumption data are at the center of applications that facilitate improved energy management and support a more sustainable future, but such data are privacy-sensitive since they have the potential to reveal a great number of details about the daily life of users. Our study contributes to an understanding of how to communicate energy data privacy via user interfaces by looking into the relevancy and accessibility priorities of potential privacy requirements in home energy monitoring, management, and production applications. All investigated requirements showed themselves to be of relevance to users, with control aspects (access, transfer, and deletion of data) being both perceived as most important and receiving the highest accessibility priority ratings, and control of data storage joining them as top access priority requirement. Our results indicate that placing the settings and information emphasized in our results prominently in the user interface, going through extra effort to ensure easy comprehensibility, and communicating them proactively, is likely to go a long way in successfully communicating privacy. Investigation of accessibility priority differences in relation to data storage location provided less clear answers but suggests a higher importance of access to general information on data collection if data are stored centrally and of the ability to view data if stored decentrally.