There’s No Place Like Home: Empower Smart Home Users for Sovereign Data Sharing

Revealing personal data makes many people uncomfortable and raises questions of autonomy loss and data sovereignty, driven by concerns about data access by companies, individuals, or governments. Nowhere is this more evident than in our homes: Smart and connected devices offer advantages but deter many individuals who feel uncomfortable sharing data from their private sphere. Previous research on data sharing, data sovereignty and data ecosystems has focused mostly on organizational actors. Our research addresses individuals in concrete data sharing situations. To gain the end user's perspective, we have embarked on an exploratory design science research path to lay the foundation for insights into individuals’ preferences through expert workshops, literature analysis, benchmarking of existing solutions, and prototyping and testing of a user interface/user experience (UI/UX) design that favors independence from individual platforms. Our work contributes a transfer of knowledge into concrete design features and lays the foundation for future research activities.