Personal identifiability

 

 

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Personal identifiability of user tracking data during observation of 360-degree VR video

On November 30th at 12:00, Virtual seminar.

Jesús Gutiérrez, researcher at the GTI, delivered a virtual seminar on the paper “Personal identifiability of user tracking data during observation of 360-degree VR video" authored by M. R. Miller et al. published in Scientific Reports on October 2020.

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) is a technology that is gaining traction in the consumer market. With it comes an unprecedented ability to track body motions. These body motions are diagnostic of personal identity, medical conditions, and mental states. Previous work has focused on the identifiability of body motions in idealized situations in which some action is chosen by the study designer. In contrast, our work tests the identifiability of users under typical VR viewing circumstances, with no specially designed identifying task. Out of a pool of 511 participants, the system identifies 95% of users correctly when trained on less than 5 min of tracking data per person. We argue these results show nonverbal data should be understood by the public and by researchers as personally identifying data.