Meta-Guardian: An Early Evaluation of an On-device Application to Mitigate Psychography Data Leakage in Immersive Technologies

The use of Immersive Technologies has shown its potential to revolutionize many sectors such as health, entertainment, education, and industrial sectors. Immersive technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR) have redefined user interaction through real-time biometric and behavioral tracking. Although Immersive Technologies (XR) essentially need the collection of the biometric data which acts as a baseline to create immersive experience, however, this ongoing feedback information (includes biometrics) poses critical privacy concerns due to the sensitive nature of the data collected. A comprehensive review of recent literature explored the technical dimensions of related problem; however, they largely overlook the challenge particularly the intricacies of real-time biometric data filtering within head-mounted display system. Motivated from this, in this work, we propose a novel privacy-preserving system architecture that identifies and filters biometric signals (within the VR headset) in real-time before transmission or storage. Implemented as a modular Unity Software-development Kit (SDK) compatible with major immersive platforms, our solution (named Meta-Guardian) employs machine learning models for signal classification and a filtering mechanism to block sensitive data. This framework aims to enable developers to embed privacy-by-design principles into immersive experiences on various headsets and applications.