Differential privacy for eye tracking with temporal correlations

PLoS One. 2021 Aug 17;16(8):e0255979. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0255979. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

New generation head-mounted displays, such as VR and AR glasses, are coming into the market with already integrated eye tracking and are expected to enable novel ways of human-computer interaction in numerous applications. However, since eye movement properties contain biometric information, privacy concerns have to be handled properly. Privacy-preservation techniques such as differential privacy mechanisms have recently been applied to eye movement data obtained from such displays. Standard differential privacy mechanisms; however, are vulnerable due to temporal correlations between the eye movement observations. In this work, we propose a novel transform-coding based differential privacy mechanism to further adapt it to the statistics of eye movement feature data and compare various low-complexity methods. We extend the Fourier perturbation algorithm, which is a differential privacy mechanism, and correct a scaling mistake in its proof. Furthermore, we illustrate significant reductions in sample correlations in addition to query sensitivities, which provide the best utility-privacy trade-off in the eye tracking literature. Our results provide significantly high privacy without any essential loss in classification accuracies while hiding personal identifiers.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Eye Movements / physiology*
  • Eye-Tracking Technology / statistics & numerical data*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Privacy*
  • Smart Glasses / statistics & numerical data*