Don't Look at Me Like That—How AR Face Recognition Changes Our Social Behaviour

Pervasive Augmented Reality, as a context-aware and ubiquitous technology, captures and scans a user's environment to create and tailor augmentations for the user. We assume that Pervasive AR will not only be commonplace in recognising the general environment of a user but also include the identification of people in its context by way of face recognition. While there is a body of research addressing privacy issues with Pervasive AR technology and face recognition individually, less is known about the implications of the asymmetry of information availability and agency on users' perceptions, acceptability, and ethical concerns. In addition, little is known about potential social behaviour changes due to those aspects. We exposed 50 participants to a purpose-developed Pervasive AR technology probe and explored the ethical and social implications of the experience. Our findings show that Pervasive AR, in combination with face recognition and asymmetric information delivery, can lead to skewed social interactions with consequences that affect users' sense of control, agency, and identity. Furthermore, this exploration raises questions about technology acceptability in general when bringing together emerging technologies, like AR and face recognition, as queried here.