PrivacyManager: An access control framework for mobile augmented reality applications

Smartphone-based augmented reality (AR) applications like the Pokémon Go game are increasingly popular. These applications make extensive use of the smartphone's camera, which may pose a privacy problem as the camera may capture sensitive images or audio information. In this paper, we present PrivacyManager, a framework that allows application developers and domain administrators to control potentially privacy-invading functionality of mobile AR applications when faced with undesirable environmental factors. Using contextual information about a user's environment, such as network signals, ambient light and sound, location, and other inputs, our framework is able to inform subscribing applications of conditions which violate a set of pre-configured constraints. This functionality is available to the subscribing applications with a minimum of processing overhead, including additional performance enhancements to streamline location-awareness with as little resource consumption as possible.