| With the recent proliferation of social virtual reality (VR) applications, sociotechnical issues have been emerging, such as harassment and abuse mediated by immersive VR technology. However, while VR‐mediated harassment and abuse have been widely studied in the existing literature, security and privacy (S&P) issues remain largely unknown. To capture dynamic and authentic perspectives of users in the social VR community, this paper conducted an in‐depth qualitative analysis of 159 threads with 5,629 posts in total from one of the most active social VR online communities – r/VRChat. Results showed that social VR users had various attitudes toward social VR privacy policy while tending to be negative toward security features. Users also faced tensions between privacy, security, and usability in their social VR experiences. Other empirical findings include social VR users’ S&P concerns and strategies. Based on the findings, this paper proposed actionable recommendations for platform designers, policymakers, and public education sectors. |
