Negotiating Privacy with Smart Voice Assistants: Risk-Benefit and Control-Acceptance Tensions

This paper investigates how gender shapes privacy decision-making in youth smart voice assistant (SVA) ecosystems. Using survey data from 469 Canadian youths aged 16-24, we apply multigroup Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling to compare males (N=241) and females (N=174) (total N = 415) across five privacy constructs: Perceived Privacy Risks (PPR), Perceived Privacy Benefits (PPBf), Algorithmic Transparency and Trust (ATT), Privacy Self-Efficacy (PSE), and Privacy Protective Behavior (PPB). Results provide exploratory evidence of gender heterogeneity in selected pathways. The direct effect of PPR on PPB is stronger for males (Male: \b{eta} = 0.424; Female: \b{eta} = 0.233; p < 0.1), while the indirect effect of ATT on PPB via PSE is stronger for females (Female: \b{eta} = 0.229; Male: \b{eta} = 0.132; p < 0.1). Descriptive analysis of non-binary (N=15) and prefer-not-to-say participants (N=39) shows lower trust and higher perceived risk than the binary groups, motivating future work with adequately powered gender-diverse samples. Overall, the findings provide exploratory evidence that gender may moderate key privacy pathways, supporting more responsive transparency and control interventions for youth SVA use.

Generative AI is rapidly entering adolescents' everyday lives during a critical period of cognitive, social and emotional development. Yet its adoption is outpacing evidence on how adolescents themselves experience, understand and negotiate its expanding role in their lives. We examined AI-related discourse on r/teenagers from January 2023 to July 2026 using validated keyword-based retrieval and a human-in-the-loop, LLM-assisted thematic analysis. AI-related discussion increased substantially over time, and 11,083 analytically coded posts revealed eight interconnected domains of experience. Everyday and social use was most prevalent (36.8 percent), while discourse increasingly shifted toward authenticity, personal control and safety, and future human roles. Across domains, adolescents questioned when AI should support or substitute for human thinking and creativity, how conversational AI changes relationships and perceptions of agency, what can still be considered authentic, who controls personal information and representation, and what opportunities and roles should remain human. These findings position adolescent AI use not simply as technology adoption, but as an emerging negotiation over AI's place and boundaries in everyday life. Supporting this transition will require developmentally appropriate AI literacy, psychological and social support, and AI systems and policies that protect adolescents' agency, privacy, relationships and opportunities for human development.

Conversational agents increasingly interact with children, yet evidence on how their design shapes children's susceptibility to persuasion comes almost entirely from the lab. We report a $2\times2$ randomized field experiment embedded in a public German Santa Claus telephone hotline. Children's calls were randomly routed to one of four LLM voice agents varying persona (Santa, high authority, vs. Helper, low authority) and framing (persuasive nudges toward prosocial wishes vs. neutral). Of 1,072 logged calls, 89 conversations (median age 6) met inclusion criteria. Persuasive framing raised the probability of a prosocial wish from 11.6% to 45.7%, robust to controls. Persona authority showed a near-zero effect: Santa did not outperform the Helper. Persona instead shaped engagement; children hung up on the Helper far more often within the first minute (65% vs. 39%). Where context already lends an agent legitimacy, how it speaks shapes children's compliance more than who it claims to be.