Navigating Privacy in Human-Robot Interactions: Conversations and Technological Boundaries

As social robots become increasingly prevalent in human environments, ensuring privacy-sensitive design has become a pressing challenge. Modern service robots, equipped with a wide range of sensors, raise distinctive privacy concerns and call for innovative ways to specify, adapt, and communicate privacy-aware robot behaviour.A range of proposals has been developed to address privacy at the infrastructural level, for example through techniques such as blurring sensitive objects. Other approaches focus on enabling users to locally configure access to physical spaces and to the data collected within them. However, technology alone is not sufficient if users do not understand robot behaviour, the data being captured, or how those data are processed and stored.This Research Topic invites contributions that explore how robot behaviour can be and has been designed and communicated in privacy-aware ways. We are particularly interested in work on:• interactional and conversational mechanisms that help people inquire about, understand, and manage privacy-related robot behaviour• interfaces, settings, and infrastructures that enable users or robot owners to fine-tune privacy-related robot behaviour• empirical, design, technical, ethical, and regulatory perspectives on privacy in human-robot interaction.By bringing together work on technological constraints, user preferences, communication practices, and governance questions, this Research Topic aims to advance understanding of how robots can be integrated into society in ways that respect privacy, autonomy, and trust. In doing so, it speaks directly to broader questions about how digital technologies - and the data-driven systems embedded within them - shape everyday life and social norms. Contributions from this Topic will inform how society navigates the growing presence of intelligent, sensor-rich machines in homes, workplaces, and public spaces. Topic editors: Maria Antonietta Grasso, Adriana Tapus, Jutta Katharina Willamowski Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/84037/navigating-privacy-in-human-robot-interactions-conversations-and-technological-boundaries