The targeted use of social robots for the family demands a better understanding of multiple stakeholders’ privacy concerns, including those of parents and children. Through a co-learning workshop which introduced families to the functions and hypothetical use of social robots in the home, we present preliminary evidence from 6 families that exhibits how parents and children have different comfort levels with robots collecting and sharing information across different use contexts. Conversations and booklet answers reveal that parents adopted their child’s decision in scenarios where they expect children to have more agency, such as in cases of homework completion or cleaning up toys, and when children proposed what their parents found to be acceptable reasoning for their decisions. Families expressed relief when they shared the same reasoning when coming to conclusive decisions, signifying an agreement of boundary management between the robot and the family. In cases where parents and children did not agree, they rejected a binary, either-or decision and opted for a third type of response, reflecting skepticism, uncertainty and/or compromise. Our work highlights the benefits of involving parents and children in child- and family-centered research, including parental abilities to provide cognitive scaffolding and personalize hypothetical scenarios for their children.

Though teens are a population with growing agency and use of smart technologies, their concerns surrounding privacy with AI and robots are under-represented in research. Using focus group discussions and a mixed methods analysis, we present teens' comfort levels with robotic information collection and sharing during three hypothetical scenarios involving a child interacting with the Haru social robot in the home. We find participant concerns align with an access-based definition of privacy which prioritizes being in control of their information and of when the robot behaves autonomously. Responses also indicate that teens conceptualize Haru not just as an intelligent device, but also as a social entity. Their shifts in comfort and discussions reflect an engagement in social relationship management with robots in the home in cases where the robot mediates a user's responsibilities and relationships with others.

To investigate a robot’s role in children’s welfare and safety, we conducted interviews with 8 Subject Matter Experts and Professionals (SMEs) across the disciplines of robotics, child technology, psychology, and psychiatry disciplines. Through qualitative analysis, we synthesize the challenges of safeguarding, compounding limitations, and potential solutions for involving robots in safeguarding as broadly defined in SME interviews. While they agree robots should not be responsible for making judgement calls, the experts also identified the ways robots can be a valuable addition to the safeguarding team. However, more conversations spanning disciplines need to occur to inform policy and legal frameworks that will better establish a robot’s role in intimate spaces in children’s lives. While this line of inquiry is specific to robots in safeguarding, many of the themes reflect the nuances of finding appropriate places for child-robot interactions in the context of children’s welfare.

Social robots are beginning to be utilized as part of the collective networks supporting pediatric treatment, however there are few studies on children's perceptions of these agents in hospitals from a privacy and safety perspective. Through a mixed-method and value-sensitive design approach, we introduced hypothetical vignettes and engaged in discussion with 15 youth who are either receiving cancer treatments or are in remission (ages 6-25), 11 of their parents, and 5 out of 8 of their clinical staff to learn how stakeholders in pediatric oncology discuss privacy concerns regarding child-robot interactions. Our thematic analysis imparts how stakeholders perceive robots as social, non-authoritative extensions of the hospital's care network. From this privacy-sensitive perspective, this study revealed that for maximizing a robot's social utility within care systems while critically engaging with the comfort and privacy preferences of stakeholders, robots should take on the role of 1) mediators of social interaction among various stakeholders, 2) companions for children and 3) informational tools for clinicians when consent is given by the family. We emphasize how assistive technologies in pediatrics should continue to be co-designed within communities for identifying appropriate roles and returning agency to stakeholders as they navigate the blurry boundaries of privacy in healthcare.