DIGITAL LIFE

The dark side of the metaverse, the lack of privacy

Scientists from the University of California at Berkeley (USA) and the University of Technology Munich (Germany) have published the results of a study on user privacy in the metaverse – the worlds of virtual and augmented reality. The results were disappointing.

The authors built their study on the escape room game for virtual reality; 30 volunteers participated in the project. As a result, scientists have identified more than 25 attributes of personal data that potential attackers and platform operators can collect from metaverse users, although this information is difficult or not available through mobile and web apps.

The researchers listed the types of data that could become a hot commodity for metaverse operators in the near future:

Geospatial telemetry – height, arm length, user interpupillary distance, room size;

Technical characteristics of the client device – sensor display and polling refresh rates, device field of view, CPUs and graphics;

Network data – channel width, client location;

Behavioral characteristics – language, handshake, voice, reaction speed, focus of vision, color perception, cognitive properties, general physical shape.

All these data will make it possible to identify other personal parameters with a high degree of precision: gender, financial situation, nationality, age and physical limitations.

According to the study's authors, the ability to obtain this data explains why, in particular, Meta* is so reassured by the current catastrophic loss of its Reality Labs division specializing in metaverse technologies - just last year, its losses were $10.2 billion on revenue of $2.3 billion

Scientists noted that some of the data in this set could theoretically be obtained using cell phones, but the metaverse turns out to be a single comprehensive data source – sometimes during the study there were situations where all this information could be collected in a matter of minutes. . In fact, metaverse operators will have enough power to de-anonymize any user. With existing mobile apps and even more so websites, all of this is simply not possible.

With their research, the project authors wanted to draw public attention to the problem of metaverse privacy and encourage their colleagues to develop protective measures. One of them they have already proposed is the MetaGuard plugin for the Unity game engine. It adds information noise to the data collected by AR/VR helmets, which prevents user identification but does not affect operation. This is a kind of analogue to incognito mode in the browser, which can be turned on and off as needed.

AVnews