Oculus 'Always On' Services and Privacy Policy May Be a Cause for Concern

A lot of people feared that something like this could happen after Facebook acquired Oculus.

It would have been a nice move if they would have respected the users privacy this time just to spite the critics.

This is why Facebook bought it to begin with, IMHO. They've got some smart people there who are prescient enough to take their web-based intent-oriented analytics and figure out that head tracking (similar to eye tracking used in UX studies sometimes) would be immensely valuable to track a lingering gaze.

That Coke paragraph isn't from Facebook, it's the article's author speculating.

At least using Facebook is free

Paying for the Ad Machine? This is ridiculous

> Facebook is building the first virtual world. Think about that.

No, Facebook is a glorified chatroom with constant surveillance and ads. The only thing unique it did was to aggregate enough gravity to become the first stop for digital peasants of all ages. Facebook is not building anything virtual first here.

No, Facebook is putting billboards up on an uninhabited island and betting on the idea that people will want to live there. Good way to ensure they don't.

There are lots of virtual worlds. There, Second Life, etc. None have become really successful, but they continue to work. Second Life supports the Oculus development unit, although not the production product. (The production Oculus is locked down; only apps from Facebook's store or with Facebook-issued "Oculus keys" will run.)

>because the software infrastructure for measuring that doesn't exist (though I suppose someone could write it);

What the hell are you talking about? The endermen in minecraft change behavior based on whether you are looking at them or not, and minecraft has hardly a bastion of bleeding edge game engine technology. The difference between making an enderman attack if you look at it for more then 2 seconds and firing a metric if you look at a coke bottle for more than two seconds is pretty minimal.

A metric tool that sends data on how long you keep certain objects within the center of your FOV can be backed with off the shelf free software[1]. The infrastructure is commonplace, well tested and used daily for a myriad of metric related tasks all over the world.

[1] http://grafana.org/

> it's not like they could have gone without.

Then explain to me why this driver needs to phone home.

Your comment completely ignores the context as well: the predilection of companies, Facebook included, has trended towards surveilling their customers at an alarming rate.

The Coke example is possible on the current hardware because head orientation leaks largely the same data.

> Can we wait until they actually do or talk about doing something bad before making a stink about them doing bad things? This is kind of jumping at phantoms, and doing that too much will mean losing the ability to do it for real.

Are you talking about the privacy aspect i.e the device regularly phoning home and sending data here?

>Can we wait until they actually do or talk about doing something bad before making a stink about them doing bad things? This is kind of jumping at phantoms, and doing that too much will mean losing the ability to do it for real.

I tend to think once they've done it it's too late: the product, once it's built, will be offered as a take-it-or-leave-it prospect, and lobbying for them to go back and re-engineer it to respect privacy is a losing proposition. We lost with Windows 10 and now there's no hope of it being fixed. I think in the beginnings of the product design cycle is exactly where these concerns should be voiced, and loudly.

The Coke example makes no sense for a couple reasons:

1) Oculus' SDK does know where your head is pointing, but it has no idea what the game engine is actually rendering in that direction. It just warps the image the game engine gives it and passes it through to the headset. There's no real way to glean semantic information about what you're looking at through their platform.

2) If Coke wanted to track this, why would they track it through Oculus instead of just asking the game developer who has agreed to the product placement to track that information themselves? That's much easier technically and from a business standpoint. Of course, you could do this for any game or application, VR or otherwise. But I guess that makes it less of a story.

then why is it phoning home? it's not normal for a driver to call home, is it?

>None of the current titles in the Oculus store have in-game advertising.

yet. you forgot the word yet.

Software mentality is eating the world. Investors expect recurring revenue from hardware now.

I hope there's still demand for no-strings-attached hardware. I'm not sure it's a viable marketing point for enough people.

We're seeing similar moves in other areas of technology, such as modern cars -- ever more connected, dubious phone-home behaviour, and so on. The "Internet of Things" hype will surely make it much, much worse.

This is not a healthy trend for customers/users, but if entire industries go in that direction because the $$$ signs are too attractive, the practical solution is likely to be statutory regulation.

When it comes to strengthening privacy and data protection in today's highly connected world, I personally have no problem with imposing that regulation. But until more normal (non-geek) people understand the implications and potential abuse of modern data collection and mining practices, until people realise it's not just annoying and slightly creepy ads they have to worry about, I doubt we're going to see a critical mass of popular concern for politicians to act.

Might be easiest to think of your privacy as a currency similar to $. The real cost is 800. They can offer you $600 and 200 in privacy, or they could offer you $800, which people would throw a fit over and not buy. This is also not entirely accurate because the raw price is a one-time purchase, while privacy is hard to upper bound and can even become more valuable later on.

Facebook operates on this extreme: it's completely "free" to use, except you have to count your privacy, which in fact turns out to be quite valuable currency. And unfortunately I think we've established several times that at least for social media or even web or apps in general that the other extreme of "pay us more of your normal$ and less of your privacy$" doesn't work well at all.

So it looks like you can't have a "monitor for your face and that's it" because human psychology.

I'm expecting this to blow up in Germany. We are already very critical of Facebook and like our privacy. (Google Chrome here still hasn't fully recovered from the rough start.)

My employer doesn't care about people's privacy. But when there's no market share then there's no need to support the product.

Perhaps it's a sign that they see the battle as already won. The widespread acceptance of Facebook et al in spite of all the bad publicity about tracking is taken as tacit approval of the surveillance economy.

what are the alternatives?