Security Issues in Shared Automated Mobility Systems: A Feminist HCI Perspective

The spread of automated vehicles (AVs) is expected to disrupt our mobility behavior. Currently, a male bias is prevalent in the technology industry in general, and in the automotive industry in particular, mainly focusing on white men. This leads to an under-representation of groups of people with other social, physiological, and psychological characteristics. The advent of automated driving (AD) should be taken as an opportunity to mitigate this bias and consider a diverse variety of people within the development process. We conducted a qualitative, exploratory study to investigate how shared automated vehicles (SAVs) should be designed from a pluralistic perspective considering a holistic viewpoint on the whole passenger journey by including booking, pick-up, and drop-off points. Both, men and women, emphasized the importance of SAVs being flexible and clean, whereas security issues were mentioned exclusively by our female participants. While proposing different potential solutions to mitigate security matters, we discuss them through the lens of the feminist HCI framework.