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Comment by michannne | Hacker News Reader

I have still never owned an Oculus Rift simply because it is owned by Facebook and while I can't know for sure what they are doing with data collected, I can try my best to not walk straight into the fire. Maybe it would actually be better for Facebook to spin off an acquisitions/ventures arm associated with the main company as loosely as possible, and leave out data and privacy concerns by not using any data from their ventures until they are wholly incorporated into the Facebook business, but I'm no legal expert and Facebook is definitely not the type of company that would stay it's hand at an opportunity of collecting even more data

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Agreed. If they were smart, they would break themselves up as Alphabet did in preparation for future investigations etc.

They could then acquire companies more "quietly".

Mark should also take a page from Larry's book and transition to the background more while lettings someone else run Facebook.

I don't think Facebook is able to get away with that, at least not as easily.

With Google my #1 concern is they'll shut it down. With Facebook I know it's going to sniff up all my data it can get its grubby hands on (which is also the #2 concern with Google if the product survives)

In any case on the subject I don't want anything but my own hardware processing anything thought related. That is not something the cloud should be involved in

It's strange not to see Valve's offerings referred when people talk about holding out on Oculus VR. The original Vive is a great device, and the Index is the current king of the hill, in this area (pricey, though, unless you compare it to an iPhone).

The Oculus Quest is much better imo

For those that buy Oculus Rift headsets in the near future, you might want to start looking for metal contacts in the headband where it touches your skin.

Are you suggesting they will secretly put this technology in to oculus headsets?

No implication. In lots of applications like this the hardware will ship with new features before the software supports them. Teslas shipped with all the autopilot sensors while the software is still catching up.

In the most charitable case imaginable, users would be invited to enable the feature in software and experience mind control of their games, uav's, or whatever.

I envision this might end up like laptop lid cameras: there won't be a hardware disconnect switch for the feature so people will put tape over the sensor pads if they don't trust the hardware not to read their eeg.

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