research-article

The not so secret life of pets: pet owners' privacy concerns for pet location data

Authors:

Dirk van der Linden,

Brittany I. Davidson,

Anna ZamanskyAuthors Info & Claims

ACI '19: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction

Article No.: 5, Pages 1 - 6

https://doi.org/10.1145/3371049.3371052

Published: 10 January 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Pet wearables are increasingly prevalent, with many incorporating location-tracking functionalities, which may reveal privacy-sensitive data about their owners' daily patterns. Typically, these devices are designed for cat (felis catus) or dog (canis familiaris) usage. However, the difference between cat and dog owners in how they interact with their pets, and the relationship they have with them may lead to differences in the perceived sensitivity of, and requirements for, the way these pet wearables should handle pet location data.

We present the results of an empirical between-groups study (N=180) investigating whether cat and dog owners' information privacy concerns for pet location data differ. We also explore the role played by the pet-human bond in this context. Our findings indicate that there is a significant (p<0.01) difference in bonding between cat and dog owners explained by co-sleeping and closeness factors, which leads to a significant correlation (r=0.26) found only among dog owners between the strength of their bonding and their perceived importance of how the collected pet location data is used (p<0.05).

We demonstrate that the relationship to our pets, not their species per sé has an impact on the privacy concerns held towards data collected via wearables. These findings have implications for the design of privacy-respectful pet wearables, emphasizing the need to understand how sensor-driven technology's privacy impact is mediated by the way we interact with different species. We discuss what explanations may underlie these findings and to what extent, and how, manufacturers and policy should take such differences into account.

References

[1]

AKC. 2019. Protect Your Pet from Theft. https://www.akc.org/press-center/articles/pet-theft/. (2019). Online; accessed 30 January 2019.

[2]

David Charles Anderson. 2007. Assessing the human-animal bond: A compendium of actual measures. Purdue University Press.

[3]

John Archer and Jane L Ireland. 2011. The development and factor structure of a questionnaire measure of the strength of attachment to pet dogs. Anthrozoös 24, 3 (2011), 249--261.

[4]

Russell W Belk. 1988. Possessions and the extended self. Journal of consumer research 15, 2 (1988), 139--168.

[5]

Russell W Belk. 1996. Metaphoric relationships with pets. Society & Animals 4, 2 (1996), 121--145.

[6]

Russell W Belk. 2013. Extended self in a digital world. Journal of Consumer Research 40, 3 (2013), 477--500.

[7]

Aaron Ben-Ze'ev. 2003. Privacy, emotional closeness, and openness in cyberspace. Computers in Human Behavior 19, 4 (2003), 451--467.

[8]

Brenda H Brown, Herbert C Richards, and Carol A Wilson. 1996. Pet bonding and pet bereavement among adolescents. Journal of Counseling & Development 74, 5 (1996), 505--509.

[9]

Sue-Ellen Brown. 2002. Ethnic variations in pet attachment among students at an American school of veterinary medicine. Society & Animals 10, 3 (2002), 249--266.

[10]

Susan Phillips Cohen. 2002. Can pets function as family members? Western Journal of Nursing Research 24, 6 (2002), 621--638.

[11]

Credence Research. 2017. Pet Wearables Market By Technology (GPS, RFID, Sensors), By Product (Smart Tags, Smart Collars, Smart Vests) - Growth, Future Prospects, And Competitive Analysis, 2017--2025. http://www.credenceresearch.com/report/pet-wearables-market. (2017). Online; accessed 21 February 2019.

[12]

Janet Haggerty Davis and Anne McCreary Juhasz. 2016. The preadolescent/pet bond and psychosocial development. In Pets and the family. Routledge, 79--94.

[13]

Direct Line Group. 2018. DOG THEFT CONTINUES TO RISE. https://www.directlinegroup.com/media/news/brand/2018/20180524.aspx. (2018). Online; accessed 30 January 2019.

[14]

Franz Faul, Edgar Erdfelder, Albert-Georg Lang, and Axel Buchner. 2007. G Power 3: A flexible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. Behavior research methods 39, 2 (2007), 175--191.

[15]

John Krumm. 2009. A survey of computational location privacy. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 13, 6 (2009), 391--399.

Digital Library

[16]

Naresh K Malhotra, Sung S Kim, and James Agarwal. 2004. Internet users' information privacy concerns (IUIPC): The construct, the scale, and a causal model. Information systems research 15, 4 (2004), 336--355.

[17]

Pim Martens, Marie-José Enders-Slegers, and Jessica K Walker. 2016. The emotional lives of companion animals: Attachment and subjective claims by owners of cats and dogs. Anthrozoös 29, 1 (2016), 73--88.

[18]

Mary L McHugh. 2012. Interrater reliability: the kappa statistic. Biochemia medica: Biochemia medica 22, 3 (2012), 276--282.

[19]

Rose M Perrine and Hannah L Osbourne. 1998. Personality characteristics of dog and cat persons. Anthrozoös 11, 1 (1998), 33--40.

[20]

PetCommunity. 2018. PetCommunity Whitepaper v2.5. https://petcommunity.com/PetCommunity_WhitePaper_v10.pdf. (2018). Online; accessed 02 February 2019.

[21]

Robert H Poresky, Charles Hendrix, Jacob E Mosier, and Marvin L Samuelson. 1987. The companion animal bonding scale: Internal reliability and construct validity. Psychological Reports 60, 3 (1987), 743--746.

[22]

Alexandre Pongrácz Rossi, Sarah Rodriguez, and Cassia Rabelo Cardoso dos Santos. 2016. A dog using skype. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Animal Computer Interaction. ACM, 10.

Digital Library

[23]

Sanne Swagerman, Clara Mancini, and Frank Nack. 2018. Visualizing cat GPS data: a study of user requirements. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Animal Computer Interaction. ACM, 10.

Digital Library

[24]

Zhengming Tang, Harlan Hile, Sushil Bajracharya, and Raja Jurdak. 2005. Pettracker-pet tracking system using motes. In Ubiquitous Computing '05, Tokyo, Japan.

[25]

Kirrilly Thompson, Bradley Smith, and others. 2014. Should we let sleeping dogs lie... with us? Synthesizing the literature and setting the agenda for research on human-animal co-sleeping practices. Humanimalia 6, 1 (2014), 114--127.

[26]

Roman Unuchek and Roland Sako. 2018. I know where your pet is. https://securelist.com/i-know-where-your-pet-is/85600/. (2018). Online; accessed 15 January 2019.

[27]

Dirk van der Linden and others. 2019. Buddy's wearable is not your buddy: privacy implications of pet wearables. IEEE Security and Privacy 17, 3 (2019), 28--39. doi 10.1109/MSEC.2018.2888783.

[28]

Dirk van der Linden, Matthew Edwards, Irit Hadar, and Anna Zamansky. 2020. Pets without PETs: on pet owners' under-estimation of privacy concerns in pet wearables. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETs) 2020, 1 (2020).

[29]

Zamansky and others. 2018. Log my dog -- Perceived impact of canine activity tracking. IEEE Computer 52, 9 (2018). doi 10.1109/MC.2018.2889637.

[30]

R Lee Zasloff. 1996. Measuring attachment to companion animals: a dog is not a cat is not a bird. Applied Animal Behaviour Science 47, 1-2 (1996), 43--48.

Cited By

Ashooh LHirskyj-Douglas IKleinberger R(2024)Surveying The Extent of Demographic Reporting of Animal Participants in ACI ResearchProceedings of the International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction10.1145/3702336.3702339(1-7)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3702336.3702339
Kulon UZhukova DHornecker EOsipova M(2023)Technology for Staying in Touch with Pets: The Future or Future Not to ComeProceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia10.1145/3626705.3631790(505-508)Online publication date: 3-Dec-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3626705.3631790
van der Linden DDavidson BHirsch-Matsioulas OZamansky A(2023)On the Role of Technology in Human–Dog Relationships: A Future of Nightmares or Dreams?IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society10.1109/TTS.2022.32079914:4(352-362)Online publication date: Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TTS.2022.3207991
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

The not so secret life of pets: pet owners' privacy concerns for pet location data
1. Security and privacy
  1. Human and societal aspects of security and privacy
    1. Social aspects of security and privacy

Recommendations

Some might freak out: What if your dog's activity tracker were to have a data breach?
ACI '19: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction

Activity trackers for dogs are increasingly popular, having the potential to improve pets' welfare and providing a 'digital voice' for expressing their needs. ACI research has so far mainly focused on their impact on the pet-human bond. However, also ...
Does my dog really need a gadget?: What can we learn from pet owners' amotivations for using pet wearables?
ACI '19: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction

Pet wearables increasing popularity on the market places them also in the spotlight of ACI research. Recent studies have shown that they have the potential to impact the human-pet bond, improve caregiving and increase the motivation of owners' for ...
DOGO Smart Social Network For Pet
TEI '24: Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction

The number of furry companions (pets) in Taiwan has been increasing year by year, even surpassing the number of newborns. Taking pets for a walk is considered a basic responsibility for pet owners, but it has turned into a routine chore. Pet owners no ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

ACI '19: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction

November 2019

172 pages

ISBN:9781450376938

DOI:10.1145/3371049

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

In-Cooperation

The University of Haifa
SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 10 January 2020

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed limited

Conference

ACI'19

ACI'19: Sixth International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction

November 12 - 14, 2019

Haifa, Israel

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

7
Total Citations
View Citations
319
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)52
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2

Reflects downloads up to 26 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Ashooh LHirskyj-Douglas IKleinberger R(2024)Surveying The Extent of Demographic Reporting of Animal Participants in ACI ResearchProceedings of the International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction10.1145/3702336.3702339(1-7)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3702336.3702339
Kulon UZhukova DHornecker EOsipova M(2023)Technology for Staying in Touch with Pets: The Future or Future Not to ComeProceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia10.1145/3626705.3631790(505-508)Online publication date: 3-Dec-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3626705.3631790
van der Linden DDavidson BHirsch-Matsioulas OZamansky A(2023)On the Role of Technology in Human–Dog Relationships: A Future of Nightmares or Dreams?IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society10.1109/TTS.2022.32079914:4(352-362)Online publication date: Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TTS.2022.3207991
Kuo PPan LChiao W(2023)From Human-Human to Human-Animal Connectedness: An Ambient Display Connecting Humans to Pet DogsInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2023.217779440:11(2968-2985)Online publication date: 21-Feb-2023
https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2023.2177794
Paci PMancini CNuseibeh B(2022)The Case for Animal Privacy in the Design of Technologically Supported EnvironmentsFrontiers in Veterinary Science10.3389/fvets.2021.7847948Online publication date: 7-Jan-2022
https://doi.org/10.3389/fvets.2021.784794
McParlan Jvan der Linden D(2021)Privacy labels should go to the dogsProceedings of the Eight International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction10.1145/3493842.3493888(1-10)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3493842.3493888
van der Linden D(2021)Interspecies information systemsRequirements Engineering10.1007/s00766-021-00355-326:4(535-556)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s00766-021-00355-3

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten