Facebook data concerns spread to Oculus and VR

Facebook is currently facing difficult questions about how it handles user information, but most of the discussion has focused on the social network itself. Facebook owns many other applications and services, including the Oculus virtual reality platform, which (like all VR platforms) collects incredibly detailed information about where users are watching and how they are moving. VR hearing aids have a clear potential for surveillance and data collection, and Facebook has a poor record of protecting privacy. So, what exactly is the link between Oculus and Facebook in regards to the user's privacy?

A virtual reality platform like Oculus offers many data points that could become a detailed user profile. Facebook already records a "heat map" of the viewer's data for 360-degree videos, for example, marking what parts of a video people find most interesting. If you decided to crawl VR users at a more detailed level, you could do something like track general movement patterns with manual drivers, and then guess if someone is sick or tired on a particular day. Oculus imagines people using their headphones the same way they use phones and computers today, which would allow them to track all kinds of private communications.

The Oculus privacy policy has a general clause that allows you to share and receive information from Facebook and Facebook services. So far, the company claims that it exercises this option in very limited ways, and none of them involves giving data to Facebook advertisers. "Oculus does not share the data of people with Facebook for third-party advertising," says a spokesperson The Verge .

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The company also offers some examples of when would share data with Facebook or vice versa. Obviously, if you are using a virtual reality application created by Facebook as Spaces, Facebook gets information about what you are doing there, in a very similar way to any third-party application developer.

You can optionally link your Facebook Account with your Oculus ID, in which case, Oculus will use your Facebook interests to suggest specific applications or games. If you have linked the accounts, any friend you add on Facebook will also become your friend on Oculus, if they are on the platform. However, the opposite will not be true, so you can make friends in Oculus without adding them to Facebook. (You can also unlink accounts, as explained on a support page.)

Behind the scenes, Oculus apparently shares data between the two services to combat certain types of prohibited activity. "If we find someone using your account to send spam in a service, we can disable all your accounts," says the spokesperson. Similarly, if there is a "strange activity" in a specific Oculus account, they can share the IP address that comes with Facebook.

Oculus has not had any high profile privacy bursts like Facebook, but it worries virtual reality users. They have been raising red flags about it for years. Former Minnesota senator Al Franken questioned Oculus about its data collection policies in 2016, for example; The company responded with responses similar to those I have described above.

The biggest problem is that there is nothing that prevents Facebook and Oculus from choosing to share more data in the future. VR journalist Kent Bye raised this concern in a report last year, citing Oculus product vice president Nate Mitchell, admitting that "used in the wrong way or in the wrong hands, you can probably track more than you normally do. would be expected "in virtual reality.

As intimate as virtual reality surveillance may seem, it remains (as far as we know) not as invasive or comprehensive as the application of virtual reality. Facebook and web monitoring. Some of the things that Oculus collects, such as location data and IP address, are already being compiled by Facebook applications and pages. VR headsets can indicate where you are looking, but a common web page can achieve a similar effect by tracking where you are moving the mouse or clicking.

But if the technology of mixed reality advances, this will become a much more important problem. The writer and game developer Chet Faliszek points out that augmented reality lenses would gather much more data than current virtual reality glasses, if used for long periods of time in everyday life. (I have already written a bit about the enormous privacy implications of AR). Facebook sees AR glasses as the future, and any previous Oculus set could affect Facebook's mixed reality privacy policies in the future.

At this time, the Oculus privacy stance is ambiguous: it supposedly shares relatively little user information with Facebook but leaves its options open. If you are concerned about the long-term privacy implications of VR, this is not encouraging. But in the short term, most virtual reality users will still give Facebook more data with clicks and outmoded appearances.

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