Continuous improvement process (CIP)-based privacy-preserving framework for smart connected toys

Advances within the toy industry and interconnectedness have resulted in the rapid and pervasive development of smart connected toys (SCTs), built with the capacity to collect terabytes of personal identifiable information, device context data, and play data. Any compromise of data stored, process, or transit can introduce privacy concerns, financial fraud concerns, and safety concerns, such as location identification, which can put child physical safety at risk. This work provides an overview of the SCT privacy problem and the landscape based on previous work to address privacy and safety concerns. We further investigate technical and legislative-related privacy issues in SCT and present a confirmatory study on developers’ privacy views based on the privacy calculus theory. Finally, we present an abstract continuous improvement process-based privacy preservation framework using Plan-Do-Check-Act, which can be adopted and used during the SCT design to minimize privacy breaches and serve as a foundation for the deployment of continuous privacy control improvement in a complex SCT development context.