TARPS: A Toolbox for Enhancing Privacy and Security for Collaborative AR

Modern AR applications collect a wide range of data to leverage context-specific functionalities. This includes data that might be private or security-critical (e.g., the camera view of a private home), calling for protective measures, especially in collaborative settings where data is inherently shared. A literature research revealed a lack of development support for privacy and security in collaborative AR. This makes it difficult for developers to find the time and resources to include protection mechanisms, leading to very limited options for end-users to control what data about them is shared. To address this problem, we present TARPS, a development Toolbox for enhancing collaborative AR applications with Privacy and Security protection mechanisms. TARPS is an out-of-the-box solution to add protection features to collaborative AR applications in a configurable manner. In developer interviews, the idea of TARPS was well received and an end-user study with an application created using TARPS showed that the included protection features were usable and accepted by end-users.