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

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

#31

Post by nitrogen »

iammyIP wrote: post #12
vrfcodf wrote: post #4

From the Facebook shareholder conference call after the Oculus acquisition 2 years ago https://soundcloud.com/highway62/internal-facebook-conferenc... (Note that this is an public call, those are their official statements.) At time stamp 29:19: There might be advertising in the world, but we need to figure that down the line. That is probably where the business will come from... And at time stamp 29:50: If we are suc…

> 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.

I think they are talking about the Metaverse.

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

#32

Post by mysterpaul »

nitrogen wrote: post #29
onewaystreet wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's the first paragraph that is far more concerning anyway. The Coke is just a mild example of something that can get far worse. If this is VR, VR must die.

VR isn't defined by the companies who might misuse it, just as the internet won't die because of advertising.

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

#33

Post by nitrogen »

onewaystreet wrote: post #30
nitrogen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the first paragraph that is far more concerning anyway. The Coke is just a mild example of something that can get far worse. If this is VR, VR must die.

It's not a mild example when the truth is that they are collecting basic usage data for app recommendation and promotion just like everyone else does.

No, not everyone else does. That's the worst excuse ever.

If I buy a new monitor it's not telling Asus or Dell or HP what apps I'm using or what I look at for how long.

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

#34

Post by educar »

jimrandomh wrote: post #20

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. Here's what's going on. OVRServer_x64 is, conceptually, a device-driver component for Oculus. It does things like handle the orientation sensor input and controls which app appears on the Ocu…

> 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?

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

#35

Post by raverbashing »

hacker_9 wrote: post #2

"We use the information we collect to send you promotional messages and content and otherwise market to you on and off our Services. We also use this information to measure how users respond to our marketing efforts." "Virtual reality offers an unparalleled level of access to data for advertisers. Before metrics were measured in how long someone watched a video or how many times a link was clicked, but with VR you ca…

At least using Facebook is free

Paying for the Ad Machine? This is ridiculous

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

#36

Post by raverbashing »

karpathy wrote: post #25
Sir_Substance wrote: post #8

I just wanted to buy a computer monitor for my face. I'm paying you $600, can't I just have that? :(

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 com…

> 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.

True, but I have a choice of what I put there (also, using an ad blocker greatly reduces the tracking they can do)

One Kudos I have to give FB is that they allow you to configure what information you can send to apps that use FB for authentication

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

#37

Post by nivla »

raverbashing wrote: post #35
hacker_9 wrote: post #2

"We use the information we collect to send you promotional messages and content and otherwise market to you on and off our Services. We also use this information to measure how users respond to our marketing efforts." "Virtual reality offers an unparalleled level of access to data for advertisers. Before metrics were measured in how long someone watched a video or how many times a link was clicked, but with VR you ca…

At least using Facebook is free Paying for the Ad Machine? This is ridiculous

Well to be fair, you are not paying to use Win 10 and also its a free upgrade. On the bright side, unlike FB, you can actually install 3rd party apps and setup firewall to gain that privacy back.

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

#38

Post by wfo »

jimrandomh wrote: post #20

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. Here's what's going on. OVRServer_x64 is, conceptually, a device-driver component for Oculus. It does things like handle the orientation sensor input and controls which app appears on the Ocu…

>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.

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

#39

Post by wilg »

jimrandomh wrote: post #20

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. Here's what's going on. OVRServer_x64 is, conceptually, a device-driver component for Oculus. It does things like handle the orientation sensor input and controls which app appears on the Ocu…

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.

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

#40

Post by wilg »

Sir_Substance wrote: post #21
jimrandomh wrote: post #20

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. Here's what's going on. OVRServer_x64 is, conceptually, a device-driver component for Oculus. It does things like handle the orientation sensor input and controls which app appears on the Ocu…

>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…

If the software infrastructure does exist in Minecraft as you say, why isn't anyone mad about it potentially doing exactly what you describe with the actual product placements actually present in Minecraft? (https://store.xbox.com/en-US/Xbox-One/dlc/Minecraft-Xbox-One...)

The reason nobody is mad is because there is no evidence anything shady is going on there. Just like in this case with Oculus.

It's possible for anyone to track pretty much any metric in any software and then analyze it. So saying it's possible doesn't really mean much.

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