In recent years, social virtual reality (VR), sometimes described as the "metaverse," has become widely available. With its potential comes risks, including risks to privacy. To understand these risks, we study the identifiability of participants' motion in VR in a dataset of 232 VR users with eight weekly sessions of about thirty minutes each, totaling 764 hours of social interaction. The sample is unique as we are able to study the effect of user, session, and time independently. We find that the number of sessions recorded greatly increases identifiability, and duration per session increases identifiability as well, but to a lesser degree. We also find that greater delay between training and testing sessions reduces identifiability. Ultimately, understanding the identifiability of VR activities will help designers, security professionals, and consumer advocates make VR safer.

翻译：近年来，社交虚拟现实（VR），有时被称为“元宇宙”，已变得广泛可用。它的潜力伴随着风险，包括隐私风险。为了理解这些风险，我们研究了VR中参与者运动的可识别性，数据集包含232名VR用户，每人每周进行约30分钟的会话，持续八周，总计764小时的社交互动。该样本的独特之处在于我们能够独立研究用户、会话和时间的影响。我们发现，记录的会话次数显著提高了可识别性，每次会话的时长也提高了可识别性，但程度较小。我们还发现，训练和测试会话之间的间隔时间越长，可识别性越低。最终，理解VR活动的可识别性将帮助设计师、安全专业人员和消费者权益倡导者使VR更加安全。