The Impact of Device Type, Data Practices, and Use Case Scenarios on Privacy Concerns about Eye-tracked Augmented Reality in the United States and Germany

TL;DR

This study investigates privacy concerns about eye-tracked AR in the United States and Germany. Using four surveys that contrast AR glasses and smartphones, it analyzes how device type, use case, data practices, priming, retention, and country influence user comfort with inferring sensitive attributes from gaze data. The results show that concerns rise when data could reveal sensitive attributes and when data is accessible to humans or retained indefinitely, while device type has no robust effect; cross-cultural differences reveal higher concerns in Germany. The findings support privacy-by-design, granular consent, and user literacy efforts to enable responsible eye-tracked AR adoption and inform policy and industry practices.

Abstract

Augmented reality technology will likely be prevalent with more affordable head-mounted displays. Integrating novel interaction modalities, such as eye trackers into head-mounted displays could lead to collecting vast amounts of biometric data, which may allow inference of sensitive user attributes like health status or sexual preference, posing privacy issues. While previous works broadly examined privacy concerns about augmented reality, ours is the first to extensively explore privacy concerns on behavioral data, particularly eye tracking in augmented reality. We crowdsourced four survey studies in the United States (n1 = 48, n2 = 525) and Germany (n3 = 48, n4 = 525) to understand the impact of user attributes, augmented reality devices, use cases, data practices, and country on privacy concerns. Our findings indicate that participants are generally concerned about privacy when they know what inferences can be made based on the collected data. Despite the more prominent use of smartphones in daily life than augmented reality glasses, we found no indications of differing privacy concerns depending on the device type. In addition, our participants are more comfortable when a particular use case benefits them and less comfortable when other humans can consume their data. Furthermore, participants in the United States are less concerned about their privacy than those in Germany. Based on our findings, we provide several recommendations to practitioners and policymakers for privacy-aware augmented reality.

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: Violin plots representing the calibration survey analyses for each attribute, separated by device type and country.
• Figure 2: Violin plots representing the relationship between privacy concerns and priming types for each user attribute.
• Figure 3: Violin plots representing the relationship between privacy concerns and data-receiving entities for each user attribute.
• Figure 4: Violin plots representing the relationship between privacy concerns and data retention times for each user attribute.
• Figure 5: Violin plots representing the relationship between privacy concerns and countries for each user attribute.