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Students walk across the campus north. A large red sculpture in the shape of large gears can be seen. © Roland Baege​/​TU Dortmund

Publication of a study on trust repair strategies following privacy breaches in smart home systems

The illustration depicts an abstract concept of networking within a smart home. On a simple white shelf attached to a light gray wall sit four different smart home devices, arranged from left to right: a glowing lightbulb, a white security camera with a black lens, a square white control module or thermostat with a digital display showing "0.0" and a small red button, and a cylindrical black smart speaker. Hovering centrally directly below the shelf is a large, red warning triangle. In the center of this triangle is a white padlock that is cracked vertically down the middle, symbolizing a security breach or vulnerability. In the lower area of the image, there are four blue cloud symbols representing cloud networks. Each cloud contains a dark, stylized house icon. A network of lines connects all these elements: solid blue lines with round nodes lead downwards from the devices on the shelf to the warning triangle. Dotted blue lines also lead from the clouds at the bottom up to this central triangle. A key detail is visible on the right side near the black smart speaker: the connection lines originating from this device feature red nodes instead of blue ones in certain spots, highlighting an acute threat, data leak, or a compromised connection specifically linked to that device. Additionally, partial views of empty white picture frames can be seen on the far left and right edges of the image. © Björn Konopka​/​TU Dortmund, AI-generated with ChatGPT
Illustration of a smart home network
Which strategies help smart home providers effectively restore customer trust after privacy breaches?

The article "Selecting trust repair strategies: The case of privacy breaches in smart service systems" has been published in the journal Electronic Markets – The International Journal on Networked Business.

Authors: Björn Konopka, Kay Hönemann, Jason B. Thatcher (University of Colorado Boulder), Ning Yang (Loyola University Chicago), and Manuel Wiesche.

The study examines which strategies are most effective in repairing customer trust following privacy breaches in smart service systems. The focus is on the smart home context, where privacy breaches are particularly relevant because they can affect not only digital data but also users' physical living environments. The study is based on a scenario-based experiment with 77 experienced smart home users evaluating different organizational response strategies. Results show that regulation measures are especially effective at rebuilding trust, and that combinations of communicative and substantive strategies frequently perform best. Furthermore, the findings reveal that integrity-based violations, such as a company's unauthorized use of customer data, are significantly harder to repair than competence-based privacy breaches.

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