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Top1. Introduction
Home is a private space, in which residents perform different roles while carrying out their daily routines (Venkatesh, 1996, Kraybill, 2005). Individuals need to feel secure and enjoy emotional and physical comfort when they are inside their house (Kraybill, 2005). This may explain why homes have remained relatively untouched by the advent of online technologies and we have only just started experiencing a significant wave of change, namely their transformation into smart homes. The key attributes of smart home technologies are the ability to acquire information from the surrounding environment and react accordingly (Chan et al., 2008, Balta-Ozkan et al., 2014). On one hand they are capable of encouraging independent living, promoting environmental sustainability and offering financial benefits through daily support, monitoring and consultancy services. On the other hand, they raise serious privacy and trust issues that go well-beyond other technologies, due to their pervasive nature (Balta-Ozkan et al., 2013a, Chan et al., 2009). Therefore, technology acceptance can play a relatively more important role compared to others when examined in the context of other digital technologies, especially when it comes to examining potential risks vs the benefits a user may obtain.
Technology acceptance research has typically been considered with regards to technologies that are used in public/mixed settings (Venkatesh and Davis, 2000, Anandarajan et al., 2000, Stam and Stanton, 2010, Schmidthuber et al., 2018). It is very seldom that technology acceptance studies have considered technologies that are utilised solely in a private setting. The use of such technologies may be heavily dependent on the psychological factors of house residents, the perception of outcomes, motives and beliefs (Choe et al., 2011). For example, the perception of hedonic and utilitarian values differs across people using the technology publicly and privately. Values reflect the needs and judgement of technology utility that are peculiar to the context (E. Collier et al., 2014). Similarly, the use of technology in private spaces is connected with the potential risks of personal data leakage and monetary spending (Marikyan et al., 2019, Balta-Ozkan et al., 2013b, Aldrich, 2003), posing higher risks for users. This suggests that the acceptance and use of technology in private spaces may be based on values and beliefs that are manifested differently to those in a public/mixed environment. In terms of services, there is a divergence in tasks and the purpose of technology utilisation in private versus public settings. Technology compatibility acts as a boundary condition in adopting the technology (Shih and Venkatesh, 2004, Brown and Venkatesh, 2005).
Only few studies have examined the technology acceptance in the private context (Brown and Venkatesh, 2005, Venkatesh and Brown, 2001, Balta-Ozkan et al., 2013b, Balta-Ozkan et al., 2014). That research provided prospective qualitative insight into the potential implementation of pervasive technology in houses (Balta-Ozkan et al., 2013b, Balta-Ozkan et al., 2014), without explaining the perception of technology by actual users. The studies adopting the users' perspective ignored the role of the perceived fit of technology capabilities to user demands (Goodhue and Thompson, 1995). The fit is superior when it comes to the private use of technology, because it defines the degree of the situational applicability to the tasks that users may have, in contrast to attitudinal factors measuring the overall usefulness of the technology. In addition, the studies extend the implications beyond residential settings (Brown and Venkatesh, 2005, Venkatesh and Brown, 2001), which limits the understanding of technology utilisation in a purely private context.
Secondly, the role of potential risks pertinent to the use of technology in private spaces has not been tested (Marikyan et al., 2019, Balta-Ozkan et al., 2013b, Aldrich, 2003). The effect of beliefs about potential benefits and costs on use behaviour and the mediating role of technology fit may provide the current literature with much-needed evidence about the factors affecting technology acceptance in private spaces. Given the gaps in the literature, the aim of this paper is two-fold: a) from a technology acceptance point of view, to study smart home acceptance as a case of a pervasive technology used in a private setting and provide more empirical evidence from a user perspective, and b) from a smart home point of view, to present empirical evidence related to the balance of benefits vs the risk users experience.