Paper long abstract:

The world is becoming increasingly smart. Be it workplaces, private homes or the public space—all these realms are progressively populated by interconnected smart devices and ambient intelligence promising gains in efficiency, safety, security, convenience, and comfort. To provide their functionality, all these artifacts depend on data being collected, processed, stored, and interpreted. With a growing interconnectedness of devices and services, different kinds of data are increasingly related to one another, frequently combining big-data-assets with individual data.

Although not explicitly designed as surveillance technologies, those smart environments bear the potential to form an extremely dense surveillance network which extends into the most private realm and whose data are considerably more meaningful than e.g. an individual's 'mere' location. But the system of ubiquitous visibility emerges, quasi, as a by-product and Big Brother enters through the back door, borne by the desire for gains in quality of life.

Drawing on qualitative interview data gathered in a project on the social acceptance of cloud-based smart-home-technologies, the paper explores this issue of privacy and surveillance against the background of cloud-connected smart environments. From the interviews, we gain insights into the visions and fears that individuals harbor concerning smart artifacts and the socio-technical network they constitute as well as their expectations about the technology's impact on privacy and its influence in terms of behavioral control. The paper concludes with an outlook on the question of trust in smart environments and some implications for their design.