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Comment by vermilingua | Hacker News Reader

A surprise to exactly nobody.

When are people going to stop rewarding the exploitative behavior of Facebook and its offspring?

The DK2 was the last Oculus device I owned precisely due to this. I would have absolutely purchased the CV1 were it not for the FB acquisition.

There is something subconsciously intimate about the movements of my head. The idea of FB getting off to that (obvious to everyone, except the willfully ignorant, that they eventually would) is incredibly creepy.

They won't. People buy what's in the store / is marketed and expect products to work, functionally, but also in the greater context, in their effect on society as a whole. Voting with the dollar does not generally work to steer corporate behaviour.

Yeah in the same sense your vote doesn't decide the election. It certainly has worked wiith many missteps fallen into obscurity. Marketing is a post-facto category for success. If everything is done right for a campaign but the CEO says something outrageous it is all undone like the infamous Gerald Rattner incident.

And facebook is not a traditional corporate structure so holding facebook/Zuck accountable can only be accomplished via legislation.

Yes. However, it is not apparent which inferences are possible to make with this kind of sensor data. How invasive might this become?

> How invasive might this become?

Brain-wave-scanning kind of invasive. FB (and advertising in general) will continue to become ever more invasive until it meets a limiting factor. That limiting factor will possibly be legislation (just not in the US because worshiping the Dollar overrides anything and everything else).

Do we know the first thing about how brain waves correlate to any real world properties of a person? If Facebook or anyone else can crack brain waves, ie in a sense "read your mind", it seems like serving ads is the least of our worries, but also pretty exciting in terms of the potential positive applications.

We've already got "EEG to categorised-eyeball-images" technology; in fact, that was a relatively primitive application of neural nets. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/787101v2.full

No, I don't think it unlikely that the next-gen Oculus might do this.

Well, system that has brain wave data and full information on your visual feed and body position and movement can do quite a bit of correlation

It is not exactly clear to me whether you are down playing the implications or not, but lets assume you are:

If this weren't invasive, they wouldn't be doing it. What use would random data be to Facebook? Also, it is irrelevant: if I buy a VR set I want to use it for whatever I see fit, not get hooked into some data collection machine. How is it that we have come to accept that in order to use products, that we buy even, we have to hand over lots of data?

I'm not. I believe that this kind of data in combination with machine learning makes for the perfect storm. While users may not understand the difference from before.

Sounds like machine learning in this case would lead to GIGO as essentially automated superstition. It would get what, use time, how much time is spent moving using it and maybe height data and try to map to products the advertisers want to sell?

The article talks about 3D maps of user's environment. One can infer what kind of furniture and home appliances you have and use, for example.

The article also says Facebook claims that data is remaining local and will not be used for advertising.

Facebook is well known for such claims, about Instagram, WhatsApp and other things. Data inference may very well be done locally.

So you think they are lying in a legally-binding document? If that's the case, they would be doing this already and this change would be irrelevant.

The article cites answers they had received from Facebook, not "legally-binding document".

The VR data is local but the fact that you own the device gets sent so ads can be displayed targetting VR owners.

So they are not breaking any laws while still targetting you for owning the unit.

They'll classify how people move and join that with profiles they've already created on Facebook.

They'll try to figure out if you have any kind of disability.

There are cameras and microphones on the things

As invasive as they can convince people to buy

Some already stopped rewarding such behavior. It's the precise reason why I chose Vive over Oculus.

the problem, as i see it, is not with data collection itself. because the larger public 1. does not care 2. does not seem concerned. 3. the collected data is deemed harmless to the user.

what worries me is the sampling itself. or how diverse the sample is. using VR users data to draw any conclusion is misrepresenting the larger population. now if we are all into VR or use it, this might be different...

Good news! China has solved the problem by watching everyone, finally giving us what we all want - crushing levels of omnipresent surveillance, without any diversity-harming biased sampling. Because that's the worst part about surveillance - not how it's (often legally) abused by power, but how it's not fair for diversity.

Why is it a problem that facebook gets skewed data when spying on its users? It won’t give me any sleepless nights, that’s for sure.

Most people do not understand how much is collected, how it can be connected, or how it is shared with random companies with no accountability. Often they are fairly shocked when specific examples are brought to light.

But there are lot of problems in the world, and none of us can be sure where to rank this one.

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