Misalignments between Privacy Claims and Privacy Policies in Smart Sex Toys
2026 (English)In: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) , 2026Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
We present a content analysis of the privacy policy documentation and product descriptions from 146 smart sex toys across fourteen brands. We examine marketing narratives, policy accessibility, and disclosure completeness. We contribute an empirical illustration of a disregard for data privacy considerations in product descriptions and vague references to data privacy in privacy policy documentation. Among available privacy policy documentation, critical data storage and transmission details were frequently omitted or ambiguous, leading to misalignment with privacy claims in marketing materials. Our findings highlight inadequate transparency in the industry, paralleling issues in broader IoT systems and FemTech products and services. We underscore the need for HCI researchers, designers, and practitioners to address the structural inefficiency of policy compliance, the need to elevate privacy as an essential feature in products that collect and store sensitive and intimate data, and the stakes of privacy in the context of digital intimacy. © 2026
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) , 2026.
Keywords [en]
intimate data, marketing, privacy, Smart sex toys
National Category
Computer and Information Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:ri:diva-81689DOI: 10.1145/3772318.3791454Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105038699263OAI: oai:DiVA.org:ri-81689DiVA, id: diva2:2064717
Conference
CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2026, Barcelona, Spain, April 13-17, 2026
Note
QC 20260602
2026-06-022026-06-022026-06-02Bibliographically approved