Personalized avatars with custom levels of privacy

Abstract

Mechanisms are provided for customizing an avatar in a virtual environment. A user that is interacting with the virtual environment, and to whom the avatar is to be rendered in the virtual environment, is identified and classified with regard to a plurality of affinity groups specifying levels of affinity between the first user and an operator of the avatar. A user security and privacy policy (USPP) data structure, associated with the operator, is retrieved that specifying security and privacy policies for each affinity group in the plurality of affinity groups. Based on the user classification and the security and privacy policy, an anonymization operation is applied to static and/or dynamic characteristics data for the operator which are used to render the avatar, to thereby generate anonymized characteristic data. The anonymized characteristic data is output for rendering the avatar in the virtual environment.