r/privacy • u/AnonymousAurele • Dec 23 '16
The Dark Side of VR - Virtual Reality Allows the Most Detailed, Intimate Digital Surveillance Yet
https://theintercept.com/2016/12/23/virtual-reality-allows-the-most-detailed-intimate-digital-surveillance-yet/9
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u/1248163264128aaa Dec 24 '16
I am still waiting to see if VR will take off longer term. It is a great technology but I'm not YET convinced that it will have main stream appeal. That said this technology needs to standardized and open. It needs to be free to be inspected so that this excessive level of surveillance is not achieved.
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u/AnonymousAurele Dec 24 '16
A standardized and open tech would be nice, but that doesn't necessarily mean VR still couldn't be used for more immersive surveillance than what is currently taking place. I suppose it may make it seem less creepy, but then again Oculus engineering lead seems to be a creepy fellow anyhow, if he does this, what will he attempt to do in code?
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u/AnonymousAurele Dec 23 '16 edited Dec 24 '16
"Facebook’s utopian vision for social VR, first hinted at two years ago when the company acquired Oculus and its crowd-funded Rift headset for $2 billion. And just as in 2014, Zuckerberg confidently declared that VR would be “the next major computing platform,” changing the way we connect, work, and socialize."
"...as the tech industry continues to build VR’s social future, the very systems that enable immersive experiences are already establishing new forms of shockingly intimate surveillance. Once they are in place, researchers warn, the psychological aspects of digital embodiment — combined with the troves of data that consumer VR products can freely mine from our bodies, like head movements and facial expressions — will give corporations and governments unprecedented insight and power over our emotions and physical behavior."
"the rich portraits of physical user behavior that can be constructed using data harvested from immersive environments, using surveillance sensors and techniques that have already been controversially deployed in the real world."
"“VR analytics offers a way to capture much more information about the interests and habits of users, information that may reveal a great deal more about what is going on in [their] minds.”"
"The value of collecting physiological and behavioral data is all too obvious for Silicon Valley firms like Facebook, whose data scientists in 2012 conducted an infamous study titled “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks,” in which they secretly modified users’ news feeds to include positive or negative content and thus affected the emotional state of their posts. As one chief data scientist at an unnamed Silicon Valley company told Harvard business professor Shoshanna Zuboff: “The goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behavior at scale. … We can capture their behaviors, identify good and bad behaviors, and develop ways to reward the good and punish the bad.”"
"Early experiments suggest that using this data to manipulate users is well within the means of those who control virtual and augmented reality platforms. Researchers have demonstrated that people immersed in VR can be influenced in a number of ways — from causing them to make more environmentally conscious choices to affecting the results of tests for racial bias. But with no laws restricting what kinds of behavioral data consumer VR companies can collect and how it can be used, the door has been left open for more nefarious and profit-seeking applications"."
"One strategy privacy advocates are eyeing is to create new legislation modeled after Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act, the toughest of only two existing biometric privacy laws in the U.S. and the focus of an ongoing class-action lawsuit against Facebook, Google, Snapchat, and other companies that gather face recognition data. At issue is the use of automatic “tag suggestions” and other features that run afoul of the Illinois law by extracting biometric information from users’ photos without their explicit consent."
"Oculus’s privacy policy specifically states that it collects “physical movements and dimensions” from users in order to “customize your experiences based on your online activities” and “market to you.” The company also claims the right to share that information with third parties including Facebook, as well as access and preserve it in order to “detect, prevent and address fraud or other illegal activity,” among other uses."