Position: Robot Privacy as Embodied Boundary Work. Connecting Capabilities, Contexts, and Design Responses in Everyday Robotics

Title:Position: Robot Privacy as Embodied Boundary Work. Connecting Capabilities, Contexts, and Design Responses in Everyday Robotics

Abstract:Robots are increasingly entering everyday environments where privacy is shaped not only by data practices, but also by spatial, bodily, social, and relational boundaries. Their embodied capabilities allow them to reshape these boundaries through situated action, challenging privacy framings centered on data flows, interface settings, or one-time consent. Prior work has examined robot privacy through sensing, data collection, telepresence, transparency, consent, bystander awareness, and multi-stakeholder governance. Building on this work, we propose embodied boundary privacy as a capability-by-context framing for examining how physically present robots may reshape privacy boundaries in situated interaction. Specifically, this framing organizes privacy risks across seven robot capabilities and five deployment contexts, asking how embodied capabilities enable boundary crossings and how situated contexts shape who is affected, how these crossings are interpreted, and when they become contested. We use this perspective to outline design and research implications for embodied privacy mechanisms, including boundary checkpoints, viewpoint-aware sensing control, remote-presence disclosure, object- and body-level access rules, constraints on socially persuasive privacy influence, and local interruption rights. We encourage HRI research, design, and governance to treat robot movement, orientation, proximity, object access, remote presence, and social expression as privacy-relevant actions whose meaning depends on context.

8 pages, 1 figure, 3 tables. Accepted for publication in UbiComp Companion '26

Robotics (cs.RO); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC)

arXiv:2608.21410 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2608.21410v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.21410 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

https://doi.org/10.1145/3798063.3837408 Focus to learn more DOI(s) linking to related resources

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