Enhancing User Experience with Visual Controls for Local Differential Privacy
Xueting Li, Shiyao Dong, Amin Milani Fard · Journal of Cybersecurity and Privacy · 2025
While Local Differential Privacy (LDP) offers strong privacy guarantees for IoT data collection, users often struggle to understand its implications and control their privacy settings. This paper presents a user-centric approach to implementing LDP in smart home environments, focusing on voice command privacy. We analyze privacy control patterns across major smart home platforms and propose a novel interface that translates complex LDP parameters into four intuitive privacy levels. The interface combines visual controls with concrete examples showing how privacy transformations affect voice commands. By mapping mathematical privacy parameters to user-friendly settings while maintaining theoretical guarantees, our approach explores making differential privacy more accessible in IoT environments. We validated our design through a usability study to understand its strengths in accessibility and key areas for refinement.