Dynamic Consent: Physical Switches and Feedback to Adjust Consent to IoT Data Collection

From smart homes to highly energy-optimized office building and smart city, the adoption of living in smart spaces requires that the inhabitants feel comfortable with the level of data being collected about them in order to provide smartness. However, you usually provide this consent on—or best before—your very first interaction. Thus, firstly your consent might vary over the time of usage. Secondly, it is not always obvious if data is currently collected or not. This paper addresses two missing elements in the interaction with a smart environment: First, the general concept of dynamicity of consent to data collection. Second, provision of a physical interaction to gather and change consent and a physical feedback on the current data collection status. By the feedback being physical we mean being visual, haptic or accoustic, in order to allow natural perception by the users in the physical space. For both components we provide examples which show how one could make both the current status as well as the consent physical and discuss the user perception. We argue that having a physical interaction to start potentially privacy-invasive data collections is a useful enrichment for legal consent, and physically visible status is helpful to make a decision.