SoK: Data Privacy in Virtual Reality

Abstract

The adoption of virtual reality (VR) technologies has rapidly gained momentum in recent years as companies around the world begin to position the so-called "metaverse" as the next major medium for accessing and interacting with the internet. While consumers have become accustomed to a degree of data harvesting on the web, the real-time nature of data sharing in the metaverse indicates that privacy concerns are likely to be even more prevalent in the new "Web 3.0." Research into VR privacy has demonstrated that a plethora of sensitive personal information is observable by various would-be adversaries from just a few minutes of telemetry data. On the other hand, we have yet to see VR parallels for many privacy-preserving tools aimed at mitigating threats on conventional platforms. This paper aims to systematize knowledge on the landscape of VR privacy threats and countermeasures by proposing a comprehensive taxonomy of data attributes, protections, and adversaries based on the study of 68 collected publications. We complement our qualitative discussion with a statistical analysis of the risk associated with various data sources inherent to VR in consideration of the known attacks and defenses. By focusing on highlighting the clear outstanding opportunities, we hope to motivate and guide further research into this increasingly important field.

References in corpus (12)

• A Survey on Metaverse: Fundamentals, Security, and Privacy
• Metaverse: Security and Privacy Issues
• QuestSim: Human Motion Tracking from Sparse Sensors with Simulated Avatars
• The Dark Side of Perceptual Manipulations in Virtual Reality
• A privacy-preserving approach to streaming eye-tracking data
• Differential Privacy for Eye-Tracking Data
• Going Incognito in the Metaverse: Achieving Theoretically Optimal Privacy-Usability Tradeoffs in VR
• Exploring the Privacy Risks of Adversarial VR Game Design
• Do Smart Glasses Dream of Sentimental Visions? Deep Emotionship Analysis for Eyewear Devices
• Inferring Private Personal Attributes of Virtual Reality Users from Head and Hand Motion Data
• Conservative Plane Releasing for Spatial Privacy Protection in Mixed Reality
• How Interactions Influence Users' Security Perception of Virtual Reality Authentication?

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Exploring the Privacy Risks of Adversarial VR Game Design
• How LLMs are Shaping the Future of Virtual Reality
• Understanding Parents' Perceptions and Practices Toward Children's Security and Privacy in Virtual Reality
• Effect of Duration and Delay on the Identifiability of VR Motion
• Effect of Data Degradation on Motion Re-Identification