5 Minutes in VR โ€“ and youโ€™re identified!

A recent study shows, that only ๐—ณ๐—ถ๐˜ƒ๐—ฒ ๐—บ๐—ถ๐—ป๐˜‚๐˜๐—ฒ๐˜€ ๐—ถ๐—ป ๐—ฉ๐—ฅ ๐—ฐ๐—ฎ๐—ป ๐—ถ๐—ฑ๐—ฒ๐—ป๐˜๐—ถ๐—ณ๐˜† ๐˜†๐—ผ๐˜‚๐—ฟ๐˜€๐—ฒ๐—น๐—ณ with a high percentage. You donโ€™t have to be logged in, authenticated, or somehow identified. Only your movements, the time pattern of your gestures, or the way you control your avatar is enough (see https://lnkd.in/euRE6xyw).
The authors show, that their system is able to identify an user with 95% accuracy out of a pool of 511 participants when trained less than 5 minutes.

This outlines, that our movements, behavior, actions and interactions in virtual spaces are not anonymous and can be used to inference our real identity. Thatโ€™s kind of โ€žFace-IDโ€™ing you Avatarโ€œ without knowing.

This is quite worrying and scary in ad least two perspectives:

1. ๐˜‚๐˜€๐—ฒ๐—ฟ๐˜€ ๐—ฎ๐—ฟ๐—ฒ ๐—ป๐—ผ๐˜ ๐—ฎ๐˜„๐—ฎ๐—ฟ๐—ฒ ๐—ผ๐—ณ ๐—ฏ๐—ฒ๐—ถ๐—ป๐—ด ๐—ถ๐—ฑ๐—ฒ๐—ป๐˜๐—ถ๐—ณ๐—ถ๐—ฎ๐—ฏ๐—น๐—ฒ in anonymous worlds
2. identification in ๐—ฉ๐—ฅ ๐—ฟ๐—ฒ๐—พ๐˜‚๐—ถ๐—ฟ๐—ฒ๐˜€ ๐—ฐ๐—ผ๐—ป๐˜๐—ฒ๐˜…๐˜๐˜‚๐—ฎ๐—น ๐—ถ๐—ป๐—ณ๐—ผ๐—ฟ๐—บ๐—ฎ๐˜๐—ถ๐—ผ๐—ป and such contexts can easily be ๐—บ๐—ถ๐˜€๐—ถ๐—ป๐˜๐—ฒ๐—ฟ๐—ฝ๐—ฟ๐—ฒ๐˜๐—ฒ๐—ฑ leading to wrong results.

In terms of education and public awareness, this is a hot topic to discuss! Also for vendors or virtual applications, this is an important finding on which various use cases could be built.

Iโ€™ll utilize the upcoming events in May, like the MEWS โ€“ The Metaverse Entertainment Worlds or Identiverse, to provide more insight and showcase possible solutions and will keep you updated here.