A Study of User Privacy in Android Mobile AR Apps

With the development of augmented reality (AR) technology, the use of mobile AR applications (MAR apps) is rising rapidly in various aspects of people’s everyday lives, such as games, shopping, and education. When compared to traditional apps, AR apps typically need access to the smartphone’s camera all the time and collect and analyze significantly more data, such as sensor data, geolocation, and biometric information. Due to the sensitivity and volume of data collected by MAR apps, new privacy concerns are raised. In this paper, we describe a preliminary empirical study of Android MAR apps in terms of the sensitive data collected by MAR apps, whether the collected data is well protected, and whether the data practice is publicly available so that users can learn about the data safety and make informed decisions when deciding which apps to install. In this study, we analyzed 390 real-world MAR apps and reported the dangerous permissions they requested, the data leaks detected in them, and the availability of their data safety.