At the VR Privacy Summit in November 2018, I met a number of privacy engineers who were actively implementing privacy-first architectures. I wanted to bring together some a group of these forward-thinking privacy architects together for a more technical panel discussion at SIGGRAPH in order to share some of the insights and open questions and problems yet to be fully resolved. Here are the panelists that I brought together for this discussion:
- Matt Miesnieks: Co-founder & CEO 6D.AI
- Diane Hosfelt: Privacy and Security Lead on Mozilla’s Mixed Reality Team
- Taylor Beck: Privacy Operations Lead at Magic Leap
- Samantha Matthews Chase: Founder at Venn Agency focusing on self-sovereign identity, safety & security
This is the first time that Magic Leap talked about some of their privacy-first architecture philosophy, and I’m really impressed with how seriously they’re taking the ethical implications of mixed reality. Beck cited the eight Fair Information Practice Principles as a key document that helps them operationalize their privacy practices at Magic Leap. Miesnieks wrote an article for Tech Crunch titled “AR will mean dystopia if we don’t act today,” which lays out what’s at stake when it comes to the future of the AR Cloud. Mozilla’s Diane Hosfelt wrote a paper in May titled “Making ethical decisions for the immersive web,” which gives a lot of great context for privacy engineering for the immersive web. And Samantha Matthews Chase has been working with helping form the W3C standards for Decentralized Identifiers and self-sovereign identity, and previously participated on panel looking at how blockchain technologies could be used with immersive tech to help people take more control over their data.
A big take away from this panel is that Privacy in XR is Hard, but it’s definitely worth trying to come up with ethical frameworks that can help provide some best practices.
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Music: Fatality
