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Privacy Concerns of Smart Speaker Users in South Korea: A Text-mining Analysis

  • Received : 2023.01.26
  • Accepted : 2023.08.30
  • Published : 2023.12.31

Abstract

Smart speakers represent a growing product in home electronics. However, their capability to record voices in their immediate surroundings has spurred concerns about privacy violations. In this paper, we assess the extent of those concerns in the opinions of smart speaker users by examining the reviews posted by smart speaker users. We focus on South Korea as a representative of advanced Asian economies. The results show that Korean smart speaker users are either unconcerned or unaware of privacy issues, confirming the results of previous studies about UK users, but with an even lower degree of interest in the topic. However, for the few users concerned about privacy, their attitude towards privacy influences their overall opinion about smart speakers.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

Hong Joo Lee was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2020S1A3A2A02093277), and by The Catholic University of Korea, Research Fund, 2023.

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