The Impact of Privacy on the Development of Voice Assistants: To what extent do Customer Mistrust and Privacy Policy hinder or shape the Development of Amazon Alexa’s Voice Technology?
- The purpose of this paper is to identify the impact of privacy concerns and regulation on the development of voice assistants. With particular focus on Amazon Alexa, the effects of customer mistrust and privacy policies on innovation processes will be analyzed. With voice assistants becoming increasingly ubiquitous, personal, and pervasive, customers and legislators have questioned their trustworthiness. The vendor’s dependence on the collection and processing of vast amounts of data to perform, and continuously improve customer requests has resulted in significantly higher customer privacy concerns. Consequently, leading companies have been facing challenges to gain customer trust. In an attempt to give an overview of how customer trust, privacy policy, and the continuous development of voice assistants relate, and to provide recommendations on how Amazon can safeguard customer trust while remaining innovative, this paper combines the review of current literature with a qualitative study. Through three semi-structured interviews with experts from leading voice assistant providers, the research problem is investigated. The findings indicate that customer trust is mediated and moderated by a set of variables. Generally, privacy policies have a positive effect on customer trust and perceived privacy. Voice service providers can actively nurture positive influences of trust, while mitigating adverse effects, by understanding trust beyond the issue of data collection requirements. Therefore, this paper enhances the understanding of the drivers of mistrust and the relationship between customer trust, privacy policies, and innovation.