Eye Tracking Knows Too Much

What Does Your Gaze Reveal About You? On the Privacy Implications of Eye Tracking Jacob Leon Kröger¹˒³(©), Otto Hans-Martin Lutz¹˒²˒³, and Florian Müller¹˒³ ¹ Technische Universität Berlin, Straße Des 17. Juni 135, 10623 Berlin, Germany kroeger@tu-berlin.de ² Fraunhofer Institute For Communication Systems Berlin, Germany ³ Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, Berlin, Germany Abstract. Technologies to measure gaze direction and pupil activity have become efficient, cheap, and compact and are finding increasing use in many fields, including gaming, marketing, driver safety, military, and healthcare. Besides offering numerous useful applications, the rapidly expanding technology raises serious privacy concerns. The loss of advanced data analytics, gaze patterns can reveal much more information than a user has and expects to give away. Drawing from a broad range of scientific disciplines, this paper provides a structured overview of personal data that can be inferred from recorded eye activities. Our analysis of the literature shows that eye tracking data may implicitly contain information about a user’s biometric identity, gender, age, ethnicity, body weight, personality traits, drug consumption habits, emotional state, skills and abilities, fears, interests, and sexual preferences. Certain eye tracking measures may even reveal specific cognitive processes and can be used to diagnose various physical and mental health conditions. By portraying the richness and sensitivity of gaze data, this paper provides an important basis for consumer education, privacy impact assessments, and further research into the societal implications of eye tracking. Keywords: Eye Tracking · Gaze · Pupil · Iris · Vision · Privacy · Data mining Fig. 1. Overview of sensitive inferences that can be drawn from eye tracking Data commonly captured by eye trackers eye opening and closure (e.g., blink duration and frequency, avg. distance between eyelids) eye movements (e.g., gaze fixations, saccades, smooth pursuit, ocular tremor) eye status (e.g., reddened, watery, dry) pupil properties (e.g., pupil size, pupil reactivity) iris characteristics (e.g., eye color, iris texture) facial attributes (e.g., wrinkles, eye shape, skin color, facial expressions) possible inference of personal information gender geographical origin biometric identity age personality traits mental workload cognitive processes expectations memories internal reasoning mental computation

На изображении показан фрагмент научной статьи об отслеживании взгляда и схема данных, которые могут собирать eye trackers. Шутка строится на тревожном осознании того, что по движению глаз можно вывести почти всё о человеке: пол, возраст, личность, эмоции, здоровье и даже внутренние мысли.

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