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Are You Anonymous? Inferring Personal Information from Nonverbal Behavior Data Tracked in Immersive Virtual Reality

Published: 14 October 2023 Publication History

Abstract

The growing adoption of virtual reality (VR) technology has raised concerns regarding individuals’ privacy. We explored people’s ability to infer personal information about others from representations of nonverbal behavior data tracked in VR. We conducted a within-subject experiment with 53 participants to explore if they could guess personal information from gestures, spatial behavior, and a combination of both represented through neutral avatars in VR. We found that participants could not guess better than random for most features, except for age and native English speaker status. Furthermore, there were almost no differences between the various types of behavior, except for native English speaker status. We discuss how our results contradict previous research on people’s identification from nonverbal behavior. Our study is the first to address people’s ability to infer other people’s information from nonverbal behavior in VR.

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  • (2024)Avatar Privacy Challenges in the Metaverse: A Comprehensive Review and Future DirectionsInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2024.237409141:4(1967-1984)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2024

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CSCW '23 Companion: Companion Publication of the 2023 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
      October 2023
      596 pages
      ISBN:9798400701290
      DOI:10.1145/3584931
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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      Published: 14 October 2023

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      Author Tags

      1. nonverbal behavior
      2. perceived identification
      3. privacy
      4. virtual reality

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      • (2024)Avatar Privacy Challenges in the Metaverse: A Comprehensive Review and Future DirectionsInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2024.237409141:4(1967-1984)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2024

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