Christoph Lutz, together with co-authors Maren Schöttler (Free University of Berlin) and Christian Pieter Hoffmann (University of Leipzig) recently published the article The Privacy Implications of Social Robots: Scoping Review and Expert Interviews in Mobile Media & Communication (2018 Impact Factor of 2.333). In this paper, the authors combine a systematic scoping literature review and expert interviews. The scoping review, based on the Web of Science database, revealed 33 relevant publications and showed that different fields are interested in the topic of privacy and social robots. Law, computer science and medicine were the disciplines most strongly represented. The literature review also showed the prevalence of conceptual work over empirical work at this point. The interviews with six experts across academia, policy and the industry extended some of the key points from the literature review, especially the fact that privacy challenges of social robots could be more severe than the privacy challenges of other technologies due to the relative autonomy and mobility of social robots.
The article is part of a special issue on the topic of mobile media beyond mobile phones. The special issue features a collection of seven articles on emerging technologies and topics such as drones, autonomous driving and data infrastructure. The introduction to the special issue is freely accessible here.