Bystander Privacy Implications of Robots in Everyday Spaces: A Scoping Review

The advancement of AI is driving the integration of robots into everyday environments. The acceptance of these robots not only depends on direct users, but also on others who share these spaces, often referred to as bystanders or non-users. A frequently discussed prerequisite for acceptance is the proper handling of personal information as robots are equipped with means for environmental awareness, data inference, and human interaction. Although bystanders are not the main target of such processing, they can be affected by robot operation. Despite its significance, bystander privacy concerns have received limited attention in prior robotics research. In this paper, we address bystander privacy in the context of robots operating in everyday environments. We conduct a scoping review of bystander privacy issues associated with related technologies exhibiting agentic qualities comparable to robots. We analyze how agency may reshape conventional attributions of actor roles and transmission principles within the established privacy framework of Contextual Integrity. This allows us to derive transferable insights about privacy expectations as well as unique opportunities and open research issues for robots in public spaces.