How Much VR User Data Is Oculus Giving To Facebook? (theverge.com)

Facebook owns many other apps and services, including the Oculus virtual-reality platform, which collects incredibly detailed information about where users are looking and how they're moving. Since most of the discussion about how Facebook handles user information is focused on the social network itself, The Verge's Adi Robertson looks into the link between Facebook and Oculus: A VR platform like Oculus offers lots of data points that could be turned into a detailed user profile. Facebook already records a "heatmap" of viewer data for 360-degree videos, for instance, flagging which parts of a video people find most interesting. If it decided to track VR users at a more detailed level, it could do something like track overall movement patterns with hand controllers, then guess whether someone is sick or tired on a particular day. Oculus imagines people using its headsets the way they use phones and computers today, which would let it track all kinds of private communications. The Oculus privacy policy has a blanket clause that lets it share and receive information from Facebook and Facebook-owned services. So far, the company claims that it exercises this option in very limited ways, and none of them involve giving data to Facebook advertisers. "Oculus does not share people's data with Facebook for third-party advertising," a spokesperson tells The Verge.

Oculus says there are some types of data it either doesn't share or doesn't retain at all. The platform collects physical information like height to calibrate VR experiences, but apparently, it doesn't share any of it with Facebook. It stores posts that are made on the Oculus forums, but not voice communications between users in VR, although it may retain records of connections between them. The company also offers a few examples of when it would share data with Facebook or vice versa. Most obviously, if you're using a Facebook-created VR app like Spaces, Facebook gets information about what you're doing there, much in the same way that any third-party app developer would. You can optionally link your Facebook account to your Oculus ID, in which case, Oculus will use your Facebook interests to suggest specific apps or games. If you've linked the accounts, any friend you add on Facebook will also become your friend on Oculus, if they're on the platform. Oculus does, however, share data between the two services to fight certain kinds of banned activity. "If we find someone using their account to send spam on one service, we can disable all of their accounts," an Oculus spokesperson says. "Similarly, if there's 'strange activity' on a specific Oculus account, they can share the IP address it's coming from with Facebook," writes Robertson. "The biggest problem is that there's nothing stopping Facebook and Oculus from choosing to share more data in the future."

Comments

Eye Tracking Analytics

[mentil]

There's at least one VR experience that records heatmaps of what parts of the environment you look at and for how long, and sends those to the developer (although they're upfront about this, for the app I know of). Soon, VR headsets will have eye-tracking tech built in that tracks not just what is visible in your entire field of view, or even the center of this field of view, but what your eyes are pointing at. There are various benefits to this tech, but also latent worry that it can be abused for marketing reasons. Marketers have already used eye-tracking with normal 2d screens to tell what parts of their advertisements that viewers look at, or to find out how many notice product placement. It gets worse when you consider that marketers (or anyone else who you might not want passing judgement on you) find out what your gaze tends to linger on, and assume that means you like/want that thing. Who wants to get marked as gay in a database because their female friend played a VR game with your headset/PC, and was staring at the guys in it? Or worse, if you ARE gay but still in the closet. Word seems to be that VR eye tracking will remain confidential information for reasons like this, but it'll be difficult to control in VR social apps where gaze is sent over the internet to be seen by others (since the possibility of eye contact is arguably a benefit of the tech).