Making a deal with the devil and your neighbour: A structuration approach to privacy and security in practice

Video-enabled smart home security devices are increasingly being adopted with the intention to secure one’s home, but these devices present novel challenges in terms of security – not only for the owner but also for the rest of their household and other residents in their neighbourhood. We employ a qualitative methodology using rich interview data with a sample of residents from one neighbourhood that had adopted these devices and present this in the form of four composite narratives. By shifting the unit of analysis to the neighbourhood level and employing a structurational practice lens, we shed light on the complex situated uses of these novel technologies and how their use interacts with existing structures leading to varied privacy and security outcomes for neighbourhood residents. We conceptualise the outcomes of the emergent structures and practices as a Faustian Bargain - when residents enact structures in their recurrent use, in order to gain a combination of security, control, convenience and entertainment they trade their own and their neighbour’s privacy. More interestingly however, we see that the privacy that is being traded in this ‘devilish’ transaction is not paid proportionally by all.