Privacy Enhancement for Gaze Data Using a Noise-Infused Autoencoder
This addresses privacy concerns for users of gaze-based systems, though it appears incremental as it builds on prior privacy methods for gaze data.
The paper tackles the problem of protecting user privacy in gaze data systems by preventing re-identification across sessions, while maintaining data usability for benign tasks. The results show their approach significantly reduces biometric identifiability with minimal utility degradation.
We present a privacy-enhancing mechanism for gaze signals using a latent-noise autoencoder that prevents users from being re-identified across play sessions without their consent, while retaining the usability of the data for benign tasks. We evaluate privacy-utility trade-offs across biometric identification and gaze prediction tasks, showing that our approach significantly reduces biometric identifiability with minimal utility degradation. Unlike prior methods in this direction, our framework retains physiologically plausible gaze patterns suitable for downstream use, which produces favorable privacy-utility trade-off. This work advances privacy in gaze-based systems by providing a usable and effective mechanism for protecting sensitive gaze data.