Privacy by Voice: Designing Usable Privacy Notices for the Voice Interface
Authors: Aafaq Sabir (North Carolina State University), Abhinaya S.B. (North Carolina State University), Dilawer Ahmed (North Carolina State University), Anupam Das (North Carolina State University)
Volume: 2026
Issue: 2
Pages: 299–317
DOI: https://doi.org/10.56553/popets-2026-0049
Abstract: With the increasing prevalence of voice interfaces, such as smart home assistants, conversational AI, and AR/VR systems, the need for effective privacy and consent mechanisms is more critical than ever. We conducted a mixed-methods study to address the challenges of ensuring effective consent for voice-based data sharing. Through interviews with voice assistant users (n=21), we identify five key design and contextual factors for effective privacy notices: context, control flow, modality, timing, and the voice used for notice delivery. We then prototyped these notices and performed a within-subject user study (n=160) to identify preferred notice designs. We found that the voice used for delivery and timing of the notice are the most critical factors influencing user preferences, with participants favoring notices delivered in the default app voice before data is requested. To our knowledge, this is the first study to design privacy notices specifically for voice-based data sharing in voice interfaces. Our findings contribute valuable insights to the privacy design literature and provide actionable guidance for developers working on emerging voice-driven platforms.
Keywords: Voice Assistants, Privacy Notices, Third-Party Voice Apps
Copyright in PoPETs articles are held by their authors. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
