IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2018 - 61

of the metaverse engine and the metaverse instance (e.g.,
M1, M2, ...) to become a part of the world. Privacy plan
capabilities, such as the ability to: launch and control a
plan, monitor a plan, persist a plan, and determine effectiveness of a plan, are functionally coded in a game object
called Privacy Manager (PM). Such logic is loaded with the
metaverse and is present in the engine on the server and
on the clients. For example, if Unity3D is the basis for the
metaverse, then the PM is a function that may be invoked
in the scene, available through an API. In Unity each part of
a metaverse is referred to as a scene, and scenes contain
instances of game objects such as player and non-player
avatars as well as scenery such as structures and lighting.
The implementation of Privacy Plans is compatible with
Unity's functional architecture.

Managing User Privacy
This article focuses on approaches and underpinnings
that will help participants manage user-privacy while
immersed in virtual reality worlds. A solution is needed
because the social metaverse features a) large numbers
of avatars, b) "open" capabilities for moving, acting, and
interacting, and c) a wide and anonymous user base.
These characteristics may align to enable nefarious
within-metaverse tracking and surveilling. This, in turn,
is likely to be annoying and even dangerous as it may
compromise user privacy and personal information.
Our system provides various tools and techniques by
which a VR user may preserve privacy and prevent such
surveillance by others. The system may, for example:
■ Provide a means for a VR user to confuse observers
with noise and deceptive data.
■ Allow the user to become "invisible" to other users
for some period of time.
■ Allow a user to inhabit a private copy of some part
of the virtual world, so that the user may interact
with the private copy unseen by others
These techniques will not be perfect but learning how
to measure their efficacy is important. There are many
other challenges for successfully deploying such tools,
and our next steps are to study these in further detail. We
feel that privacy mechanisms that do not preserve the
continuity of the metaverse will not likely be acceptable
to the users they intend to protect. Therefore, many of
the challenges ahead lay at the intersection of algorithms
and user experience. The battle has only just begun.

Author Information
Ben Falchuk is with Vencore Labs, NJ, U.S.A.
Shoshana Loeb is with Open Ve n t u re s L.L.C.,
PA , U.S.A.
Ralph Neff is with InterDigital, Inc., DE, U.S.A.

JUNE 2018

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2018