In order to provide an overlay with which to augment reality, the technology relies on recording and analyzing the physical world indiscriminately. Essentially, it is a form of continuous surveillance. AR applications can convey a user’s surveillance stream to a company for analysis and storage, raising tricky legal questions:
- Do you have an expectation of privacy in your own home if your guests are playing AR games that might capture photos or audio of you?
- What are the potential liabilities if a game maker is hacked, exposing users’ location data?
- To what extent does the creation of a virtual overlay that incidentally incorporates copyright or trademark protected materials violate intellectual property laws? And is there a fair use defense?
- What are users’ rights with respect to inferences that can be made from the large amount of data gathered from an AR application? (For example, if the app tracks where you are, how quickly you are moving, your reaction times, and so forth, what health information might be inferred?)
Such questions have been around since AR started to appear on mobile phones, but with the coming transition to 5G mobile networks, these issues will likely grow more complicated.
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