Understanding Professional Needs to Create Privacy-Preserving and Secure Emergent Digital Artworks

TL;DR

Problem: immersive digital artworks collect participant data via sensors and devices, creating privacy and security challenges. Approach: a pilot study using semi-structured interviews with five practitioners from art and cybersecurity, followed by open coding to extract themes. Key contributions: a set of security and privacy parameters—including opt-in data collection, data minimization, threat modeling, and ongoing interdisciplinary education—and a proposal for privacy-preserving, secure software for immersive art. Significance: provides practitioners and developers with concrete guidelines to protect participants while preserving interactive experiences and informs future platform development and exhibitions.

Abstract

In recent years, immersive art installations featuring interactive artworks have been on the rise. These installations are an integral part of museums and art centers like selfie museums, teamLab Borderless, ARTECHOUSE, and Meow Wolf. Moreover, immersive art have also been increasingly incorporated into traditional museums as well. However, immersive art requires active user participation and often captures information from viewers and participants through cameras, sensors, microphones, embodied interaction devices, surveillance, and kinetic mirrors. Therefore, we propose a new line of research to examine the security and privacy postures of immersive artworks. In our pilot study, we conducted a semi-structured interview with five experienced practitioners from either the art (2) or cybersecurity (3) fields. Our aim was to understand their current security and privacy practices, along with their needs when it comes to immersive art. From their responses, we created a list of security and privacy parameters, such as, providing opt-in mechanics for data collection, knowledge of data collection tools such as proximity sensors, and creating security awareness amongst participants by communicating security protocols and threat models. These parameters allow us to build privacy-preserving, secure, and accessible software for individuals working in media arts, who often have no background on security and privacy. In the future, we plan to utilize these parameters to develop software in response to those needs and then host an art exhibition of immersive artworks utilizing the platform.