"It's like a pet...but my pet doesn't collect data about me": Multi-person Households' Privacy Design Preferences for Household Robots

Robots are increasingly entering the daily lives of families, yet their successful integration into domestic life remains a challenge. We explore family routines as a critical entry point for understanding how robots might find a sustainable role in everyday family settings. Together with each of the ten families, we co-designed robot interactions and behaviors, and a plan for the robot to support their chosen routines, accounting for contextual factors such as timing, participants, locations, and the activities in the environment. We then designed, prototyped, and deployed a mobile social robot as a four-day, in-home user study. Families welcomed the robot's reminders, with parents especially appreciating the offloading of some reminding tasks. At the same time, interviews revealed tensions around timing, authority, and family dynamics, highlighting the complexity of integrating robots into households beyond the immediate task of reminders. Based on these insights, we offer design implications for robot-facilitated contextual reminders and discuss broader considerations for designing robots for family settings.

Visual navigation is a fundamental capability of mobile service robots, yet the onboard cameras required for such navigation can capture privacy-sensitive information and raise user privacy concerns. Existing approaches to privacy-preserving navigation-oriented visual perception have largely been driven by technical considerations, with limited grounding in user privacy preferences. In this work, we propose a user-centered approach to designing privacy-preserving visual perception for robot navigation. To investigate how user privacy preferences can inform such design, we conducted two user studies. The results show that users prefer privacy-preserving visual abstractions and capture-time low-resolution preservation mechanisms: their preferred RGB resolution depends both on the desired privacy level and robot proximity during navigation. Based on these findings, we further derive a user-configurable distance-to-resolution privacy policy for privacy-preserving robot visual navigation.

Robots are increasingly entering everyday environments where privacy is shaped not only by data practices, but also by spatial, bodily, social, and relational boundaries. Their embodied capabilities allow them to reshape these boundaries through situated action, challenging privacy framings centered on data flows, interface settings, or one-time consent. Prior work has examined robot privacy through sensing, data collection, telepresence, transparency, consent, bystander awareness, and multi-stakeholder governance. Building on this work, we propose embodied boundary privacy as a capability-by-context framing for examining how physically present robots may reshape privacy boundaries in situated interaction. Specifically, this framing organizes privacy risks across seven robot capabilities and five deployment contexts, asking how embodied capabilities enable boundary crossings and how situated contexts shape who is affected, how these crossings are interpreted, and when they become contested. We use this perspective to outline design and research implications for embodied privacy mechanisms, including boundary checkpoints, viewpoint-aware sensing control, remote-presence disclosure, object- and body-level access rules, constraints on socially persuasive privacy influence, and local interruption rights. We encourage HRI research, design, and governance to treat robot movement, orientation, proximity, object access, remote presence, and social expression as privacy-relevant actions whose meaning depends on context.