  The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped the way people work, normalizing the
practice of working from home (WFH). However, WFH can cause a blurring of
personal and professional boundaries, surfacing new privacy issues, especially
when workers take work meetings from their homes. As WFH arrangements are now
standard practice in many organizations, addressing the associated privacy
concerns should be a key part of creating healthy work environments for
workers. To this end, we conducted a scenario-based survey with 214 US-based
workers who currently work from home regularly. Our results suggest that
privacy invasions are commonly experienced while working from home and cause
discomfort to many workers. However, only a minority said that the discomfort
escalated to cause harm to them or others, and the harm was almost always
psychological. While scenarios that restrict worker autonomy (prohibit turning
off camera or microphone) are the least experienced scenarios, they are
associated with the highest reported discomfort. In addition, participants
reported measures that violated or would violate their employer's
autonomy-restricting rules to protect their privacy. We also find that
conference tool settings that can prevent privacy invasions are not widely used
compared to manual privacy-protective measures. Our findings provide better
understanding of the privacy challenges landscape that WFH workers face and how
they address them. Furthermore, our discussion raised open questions that can
inspire future work.
