Meta
(Facebook)
Challenge
Facebook’s Ethics, Security, and Privacy (ESP) Standing Group invited me to run a talk and workshop on designing for privacy and security in smart home devices. The goal was to help designers, engineers, and product managers understand how smart technologies can create risks within shared households and explore ways to design with privacy in mind.
My Impact
Drawing on my PhD research, I translated academic insights into practical guidance that teams could apply to their own products. I designed and facilitated a remote workshop with over 20 participants, helping them recognise common privacy pitfalls and co-create actionable design principles for safer, more transparent smart home experiences.
Solution
The session combined a talk and hands-on workshop. I began by presenting research on how smart devices can unintentionally enable surveillance between people in the same home, supported by real participant stories and short video provocations to spark discussion. In the workshop, teams used research-based personas to map privacy risks in devices they were developing and collaborated to write design guidelines to mitigate those risks. The result was a shared understanding and a set of principles that encouraged privacy-first thinking across their product teams.
Role Designer & Facilitator | Year 2020
Structure
Talk
Privacy & Security in Smart Home Devices
The project consisted of two phases, the first being a talk I delivered to Facebook staff on the importance of prioritising digital privacy and security in the design of smart home devices. I walked the audience through my research, highlighting how smart home devices can inadvertently be used as surveillance tools by individuals sharing a household, whether knowingly or unknowingly.
I presented population-level data alongside insights from interviews and co-design workshops I had conducted with vulnerable users of smart home technology. This grounded the talk in real-world scenarios where privacy and security were at risk.
To close the talk, I shared a series of dystopian video provocations, which depicted invasive products masquerading as empathetic and caring. These videos were designed to stimulate critical thinking and set the tone for the workshop that followed.
Videos used as artefacts to provoke critical thinking and discussion
Workshop Facilitation
Crafting Privacy-Conscious Guidelines
After brief introductions and context setting, participants were divided into three groups. Each group was assigned both a primary and secondary persona, representing individuals who either lived together or spent significant time in each other’s homes and shared smart home devices. These personas were based on my research into digital privacy and security concerns related to smart home technology.
The groups were tasked with selecting a smart home device they were currently working on at Facebook and creating scenarios where the personas could compromise each other’s privacy through the devices, apps, and accounts connected to them. Once these scenarios were developed, the next step was to collaboratively create a set of design guidelines that would mitigate the privacy and security risks identified.
By the end of the workshop, Facebook staff had co-created an initial set of guidelines that could be applied to the products and services they were developing, helping to embed privacy-first design into their workflow.
