Toward Safe Child-Robot Interactions
This September, we travelled to Naples for the International Conference on Social Robotics + AI (ICSR 2025). PhD student JaeEun Jen Shin presented our latest work on how children and parents think about privacy when interacting with humanoid robots called "Toward Safe Child-Robot Interactions: Exploring Children’s and Parents’ Privacy Perceptions of Humanoid Social Robots". The study, created in collaboration with the Active & Interactive Robotics Lab and jointly funded by UWaterloo Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute and RoboHub, highlighted the need for social robots to be designed with clear privacy controls, child-friendly features, and meaningful parental oversight to support safe and trusted interactions at home.
Abstract:
As humanoid social robots (HSRs) become more integrated into family environments, it is crucial to examine privacy concerns in child-robot interaction. This study examines how children and parents perceive privacy risks associated with HSRs, focusing on differences in their comfort levels across various usage scenarios. We conducted a user study with 38 parent-child dyads interacting with the HSR ``NAO'' using pre-programmed activities. Our findings revealed disparity in robot likability, smartness, and trustworthiness. These characteristics also influenced children's willingness to share personal information (secrets). Parents and children showed significant differences in their comfort levels with sensor usage across different contextual scenarios, where parents expressed concerns about data collection, storage, and transfer, preferring supervised interactions. and emphasizing the need for transparency and control over robot interactions. These findings suggest that designing HSRs with clear privacy controls, child-friendly features, and parental oversight is essential to ensuring safer and more trusted interactions.