Facebook is backing away from facial recognition. Meta isn’t

Virtual avatars already work in video conferencing apps, and any voice modulation software will work there as well. They're even easier to use, because tracking facial expressions and mapping them to a virtual avatar can happen with just a webcam, you don't need a complicated extra set of hardware.

I really just don't believe that privacy/anonymity/anti-discrimination is the reason Facebook is making any decision with VR. And I would base that on mostly just on the entire history of the company.

This is the company that has pushed harder than any other mainstream social network to force people online to use their real names. They've repeatedly had micro-targeting bugs in their ad-system that allowed targeting people based on race, and there have been multiple instances of people having parts of their identity leaked to friends and family members through advertising. The whole facial recognition thing they're planning to get rid of was a system that would tag your real face and correlate it with your real identity online, outside of your control via other people's accounts. I know people online who's literal first experience with Facebook was as soon as they signed up immediately getting doxed/outed by automated systems that sent suggested friend requests from their alt accounts to other contacts based on their address book. This is not a system or a company that in any way cares about digital autonomy, anonymity, or user-controlled identity, it really never has, and I don't believe Mark when he suddenly starts claiming that the company has now suddenly done a 180 on user autonomy.

I'm not anti-VR; I don't think it has the workplace value that Facebook is claiming, but it does have some benefits. And there is some potential for self-expression in VR that is genuinely exciting (see platforms like VR-Chat, but notably, Facebook is doing nothing in that space). But VR is definitely not a technology that's designed to decrease the risk of abuse. When you strap a VR headset on, you're putting yourself in a vulnerable situation, and Facebook has no controls I can see that try and mitigate the fundamental problem; they don't have tons of control over avatars, they don't have voice masks.

If they're claiming lack of video passthrough for faces is a privacy feature, that's an excuse, I don't believe it for a single second. None of the rest of their setup reflects a company that honestly cares about any of that stuff. You bring up audio as being a problem on its own -- Facebook isn't helping that problem; it's moving away from text communication, and then not enabling audio filters by default in VR. It's making that problem just straightforwardly worse.

But it also relies on a shallow comparison – unlike a facial scan, DNA is not a passively collectible identifier. Collecting and processing DNA requires active, physical surveillance that downloading and faceprinting a photograph does not.

This physical limitation eliminates most practical risk of a global adversary exploiting DNA matching to build a dragnet surveillance regime. Meanwhile, facial recognition has already wrought such a state of affairs.

Incidentally, passive DNA surveillance does happen, but only in aggregate, like when sampling wastewater for toxins or other biomarkers. I'm not aware of any technology that separates the distinct DNA of individuals from mixed wastewater. If that were possible, then maybe DNA dragnet surveillance would be, too.

It seems a big assumption that a technology occupying "the periphery of our attention" is calm. A lot of apps/sites are starting to do this 'dot where you have something you need to process', and although they are less obnoxious than notifications and popups, they are still a third party deciding that I need to do something, and worse, they hang around with their 'you have left something undone' vibe until you click on them. This is not calming.

Frankly I think 'use as little of my attention as possible' should be the major principle, not 'be polite in how you dispose of my attention'

Settings -> FaceTime -> Eye Contact

Removing imperfections will become the norm, the way photoshoping magazing covers is, with all the social consequences.

In fact, people will confuse what the machine think we look like, with what we actually look like, and I'm bracing for the bias that it will create.