Virtual Curtain: A Communicative Fine-grained Privacy Control Framework for Augmented Reality

Abstract

The recent advancement of Augmented Reality (AR) technologies increase the risk of inadvertent privacy leakage from the physical world we live in. This work aims to design a new privacy control framework to help users to throttle the privacy leakage caused by the continuous-sensing camera on AR devices. We design our framework to include two parts: (1) a policy enacting part that allows users to conFigure their privacy needs, and (2) a policy enforcement part that executes those policies in real-time camera input streams outsourced to untrusted applications. We implement our system under Google’s ARCore platform with a Samsung S9 device to demonstrate our design. We conduct experiments to evaluate its function effectiveness and performance. Our experiment results reveal several challenges and opportunities for the future study of privacy control of AR systems.