Digital technologies have increasingly integrated into people's lives, continuously capturing their behavior through potentially sensitive data. In the context of voice assistants, there is a misalignment between experts, regulators, and users on whether and what data is 'sensitive', partly due to how data is presented to users; as single interactions. We investigate users' perspectives on the sensitivity and intimacy of their Google Assistant speech records, introduced comprehensively as single interactions, patterns, and inferences. We collect speech records through data donation and explore them in collaboration with 17 users during interviews based on predefined data-sharing scenarios. Our results indicate a tipping point in perceived sensitivity and intimacy as participants delve deeper into their data and the information derived from it. We propose a conceptualization of sensitivity and intimacy that accounts for the fuzzy nature of data and must disentangle from it. We discuss the implications of our findings and provide recommendations.

As we navigate physical (e.g., supermarket) and digital (e.g., social media) systems, we generate personal data about our behavior. Researchers and designers increasingly rely on this data and appeal to several approaches to collect it. One of these is data donation, which encourages people to voluntarily transfer their (personal) data collected by external parties to a specific cause. One of the central pillars of data donation is informed consent, meaning people should be adequately informed about what and how their data will be used. However, can we be adequately informed when it comes to donating our data when many times we don’t even know it is being collected and, even more so, what exactly is being collected? In this paper, we investigate how to foster (personal) data literacy and increase donors’ understanding of their data. We introduce a Research through Design approach where we define a data donation journey in the context of speech records, data collected by Google Assistant. Based on the data donation experiences of 22 donors, we propose a data donation framework that understands and approaches data donation as an encompassing process with mutual benefit for donors and researchers. Our framework supports a donation process that dynamically and iteratively engages donors in exploring and understanding their data and invites them to (re)evaluate and (re)assess their participation. Through this process, donors increase their data literacy and are empowered to give meaningfully informed consent.

In-The-wild research allows the HCI community to gain insights into personal behaviour and characteristics. For designers and researchers, this means having access to rich spatiotemporal insights reflecting user's characteristics, behaviours, and needs. However, designerly contexts require contextualized and meaningful data, and collecting it in-The-wild involves a great effort. In addition, ethical implications need to be considered. In this paper, we propose designerly data donation, a participatory approach for data collection in-The-wild, as an effective and ethical way to enable data-centric design processes. We present the potential benefits of designerly data donation around three axes: value gain, data contextualization, and roles and relationships. And we introduce the challenges of designerly data donation at the intersection of HCI, UbiComp, and design.

With the advance of the Internet and the Internet of Things, an abundance of 'big' data becomes available. Data science can be incorporated in design, which brings forward various opportunities for designers to benefit from this new material. However, the designer's perspective and their role remains unclear. How do they think about and approach data? What do they want to achieve with this data? What do they need to take ownership of designing with data? In this paper we take a design perspective to map the opportunities and challenges of leveraging large data-sets as part of the design process. We rely on a survey with 75 participants across a Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering and in-depth reflective interviews with a subset of 9 participants. We discuss the impact of data on the roles designers can adopt as well as an approach to designing with data. This work aims to inform on educational support, data literacy and tools needed for designers to take advantage of this new era of design digitalisation.