"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 can get far more granular. An ad executive at Coke, for instance, could tell just how long you stared at the Coke bottle cleverly placed inside your favorite game as an in-game ad and use that data to better place it in the game for you next time."
It amazes me that before this technology is even out and proven to work, and be a success with consumers, Facebook have already set up monitoring software to develop even more targeted advertising. At least Microsoft had the decency to wait a few versions with Windows first...
This is why Facebook bought it to begin with, IMHO. They've got some smart people there who are prescient enough to take their web-based intent-oriented analytics and figure out that head tracking (similar to eye tracking used in UX studies sometimes) would be immensely valuable to track a lingering gaze.
Thank you. onewaystreet touched on something that's quite bothersome to many of us: End-user apathy via argumentum ad populum. Using (or buying) adware, malware, and spyware is not normal, and everyone isn't doing it.
When that ugliness rears its head, people need reminded that it's not normal, it's abusive. These companies aren't poor startups trying to make ends meet, they're corporate empires who are exploiting their users in every way possible.
Apologies for being preachy, this topic really gets under my skin.
No but it tells Microsoft that, or Apple. And they've been collecting data like that since XP. You're just being an alarmist.
I for one don't really care if VR ads are tracking information like that, I kinda figured it was a given. In game ads on consoles have existed for 10+ Years, and guess what? Tracking how long the ad is on the screen was already included.
VR is supposed to be a dumb peripheral? That's incredibly ignorant - there needs to be a lot of software work to make VR work, and the company making the hardware is also making that software... Down the line maybe these will be all plug and play compatible, but in the meantime there isn't room for zealotry.
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.
install 3rd party apps and setup firewall to gain that privacy back.
Yet you're still paying for Win 10 with either money or market share, thus signaling your acceptance of that spyware. MS will continue adding exploitative features until it starts to hurt the only things they care about: revenue or market share.
You are also paying for the Oculus hardware while having no recourse to privacy even if you wanted. I am not saying Windows 10 doesn't have privacy issues, but when compared to Facebook's approach, it is far better.
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 successful in building the kind of platform that we think we can build here, there should be lots of different monetization opportunities, it is too early to make any concrete plans in terms of exactly what virtual will be.
Facebook is building the first virtual world. Think about that.
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.
No, Facebook is putting billboards up on an uninhabited island and betting on the idea that people will want to live there. Good way to ensure they don't.
There are lots of virtual worlds. There, Second Life, etc. None have become really successful, but they continue to work. Second Life supports the Oculus development unit, although not the production product. (The production Oculus is locked down; only apps from Facebook's store or with Facebook-issued "Oculus keys" will run.)
VR will give these virtual worlds a lot more appeal. As will the increase of bandwidth and improved graphics. There's a reason that two of the Linden Labs guys (the company behind Second life) are (separately) working on successors.
They are entering a new market and trying to win market share, I'm surprised at this vulnerable time they are doing this so early. I think a big segment of their target market will be more sensitive to this stuff as supposed to general population at this early stage as well.
I'm expecting this to blow up in Germany. We are already very critical of Facebook and like our privacy. (Google Chrome here still hasn't fully recovered from the rough start.)
My employer doesn't care about people's privacy. But when there's no market share then there's no need to support the product.
Perhaps it's a sign that they see the battle as already won. The widespread acceptance of Facebook et al in spite of all the bad publicity about tracking is taken as tacit approval of the surveillance economy.
The solution is liability. If you collect data about people, you are responsible for what happens to it. Additionally, If your product fails to work as intended because you intentionally added something separate from the intended purpose (like network spyware for VR hardware), then the product is defective.
We're seeing similar moves in other areas of technology, such as modern cars -- ever more connected, dubious phone-home behaviour, and so on. The "Internet of Things" hype will surely make it much, much worse.
This is not a healthy trend for customers/users, but if entire industries go in that direction because the $$$ signs are too attractive, the practical solution is likely to be statutory regulation.
When it comes to strengthening privacy and data protection in today's highly connected world, I personally have no problem with imposing that regulation. But until more normal (non-geek) people understand the implications and potential abuse of modern data collection and mining practices, until people realise it's not just annoying and slightly creepy ads they have to worry about, I doubt we're going to see a critical mass of popular concern for politicians to act.
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 completely "free" to use, except you have to count your privacy, which in fact turns out to be quite valuable currency. And unfortunately I think we've established several times that at least for social media or even web or apps in general that the other extreme of "pay us more of your normal$ and less of your privacy$" doesn't work well at all.
So it looks like you can't have a "monitor for your face and that's it" because human psychology.
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
Do not buy this product. You don't need it. Wait until holographic tech. is implemented without a VR headset.
OR you could block specific outgoing traffic that is related to VR software on your router.
Its a preposterous move in a new market and borderline insulting for a $600 product, but on one level it makes sense; if there's any demographic that's worth aggressively advertising to, its the demographic of people with the money and unrestrained enthusiasm to immediately shell out almost a grand on a first-generation luxury product.
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 Oculus' display. This has been around since the very first prototypes, and since it is a piece of hardware, it's not like they could have gone without.
None of the current titles in the Oculus store have in-game advertising. There's none in the first-party titles, nor in any of the third-party titles that I've tried. Instead, they use the traditional business model: pay up front. They're running a store, called Oculus Home, which competes with Steam. They know which games and experiences you buy on the store, and are probably measuring how many hours you spend in each, like Steam does.
And that's it. This statement from the article is straight up false:
"An ad executive at Coke, for instance, could tell just how long you stared at the Coke bottle cleverly placed inside your favorite game as an in-game ad and use that data to better place it in the game for you next time."
It's false because the Oculus Rift does not contain eye-tracking (only head-orientation tracking); because the software infrastructure for measuring that doesn't exist (though I suppose someone could write it); and because that isn't Oculus' business model.
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 metric if you look at a coke bottle for more than two seconds is pretty minimal.
A metric tool that sends data on how long you keep certain objects within the center of your FOV can be backed with off the shelf free software[1]. The infrastructure is commonplace, well tested and used daily for a myriad of metric related tasks all over the world.
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.
regularly sends updates back to Facebook’s servers.
That IS evidence of something shady going on. A display device does not need to send data over the network. This is already spyware.
And no, the endermen in Minecraft do not send data back to Mojang when they detect you looking at them. That was obviously a an example of how someone could exploit head tracking data; it would still require exchanging data with Facebook... which the article claims OVRServer_x64.exe does.
Then explain to me why this driver needs to phone home.
Your comment completely ignores the context as well: the predilection of companies, Facebook included, has trended towards surveilling their customers at an alarming rate.
The Coke example is possible on the current hardware because head orientation leaks largely the same data.
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?
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.
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.
"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 can get far more granular. An ad executive at Coke, for instance, could tell just how long you stared at the Coke bottle cleverly placed inside your favorite game as an in-game ad and use that data to better place it in the game for you next time."
It amazes me that before this technology is even out and proven to work, and be a success with consumers, Facebook have already set up monitoring software to develop even more targeted advertising. At least Microsoft had the decency to wait a few versions with Windows first...
A lot of people feared that something like this could happen after Facebook acquired Oculus.
It would have been a nice move if they would have respected the users privacy this time just to spite the critics.
This is why Facebook bought it to begin with, IMHO. They've got some smart people there who are prescient enough to take their web-based intent-oriented analytics and figure out that head tracking (similar to eye tracking used in UX studies sometimes) would be immensely valuable to track a lingering gaze.
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.
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.
Thank you. onewaystreet touched on something that's quite bothersome to many of us: End-user apathy via argumentum ad populum. Using (or buying) adware, malware, and spyware is not normal, and everyone isn't doing it.
When that ugliness rears its head, people need reminded that it's not normal, it's abusive. These companies aren't poor startups trying to make ends meet, they're corporate empires who are exploiting their users in every way possible.
Apologies for being preachy, this topic really gets under my skin.
No but it tells Microsoft that, or Apple. And they've been collecting data like that since XP. You're just being an alarmist.
I for one don't really care if VR ads are tracking information like that, I kinda figured it was a given. In game ads on consoles have existed for 10+ Years, and guess what? Tracking how long the ad is on the screen was already included.
This is supposed to be a dumb peripheral, so users can decide whether to accept psychological analysis and manipulation.
VR is supposed to be a dumb peripheral? That's incredibly ignorant - there needs to be a lot of software work to make VR work, and the company making the hardware is also making that software... Down the line maybe these will be all plug and play compatible, but in the meantime there isn't room for zealotry.
My monitor tells Microsoft and Apple what I'm looking at? Huh?
VR isn't defined by the companies who might misuse it, just as the internet won't die because of advertising.
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.
Yet you're still paying for Win 10 with either money or market share, thus signaling your acceptance of that spyware. MS will continue adding exploitative features until it starts to hurt the only things they care about: revenue or market share.
You are also paying for the Oculus hardware while having no recourse to privacy even if you wanted. I am not saying Windows 10 doesn't have privacy issues, but when compared to Facebook's approach, it is far better.
Some people got a free upgrade. Others will pay for Windows 10.
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 successful in building the kind of platform that we think we can build here, there should be lots of different monetization opportunities, it is too early to make any concrete plans in terms of exactly what virtual will be.
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.
No, Facebook is putting billboards up on an uninhabited island and betting on the idea that people will want to live there. Good way to ensure they don't.
There are lots of virtual worlds. There, Second Life, etc. None have become really successful, but they continue to work. Second Life supports the Oculus development unit, although not the production product. (The production Oculus is locked down; only apps from Facebook's store or with Facebook-issued "Oculus keys" will run.)
Second Life was somewhat successful for a while.
VR will give these virtual worlds a lot more appeal. As will the increase of bandwidth and improved graphics. There's a reason that two of the Linden Labs guys (the company behind Second life) are (separately) working on successors.
They are entering a new market and trying to win market share, I'm surprised at this vulnerable time they are doing this so early. I think a big segment of their target market will be more sensitive to this stuff as supposed to general population at this early stage as well.
I'm expecting this to blow up in Germany. We are already very critical of Facebook and like our privacy. (Google Chrome here still hasn't fully recovered from the rough start.)
My employer doesn't care about people's privacy. But when there's no market share then there's no need to support the product.
Perhaps it's a sign that they see the battle as already won. The widespread acceptance of Facebook et al in spite of all the bad publicity about tracking is taken as tacit approval of the surveillance economy.
"As we shift into a constantly connected state... "
That's a scary thought, if people are generally assuming that's the direction things will go.
People need time out, to disconnect and re-energise.
A "constantly connected" state seems like it would generate massive burn-out and/or mental issues. :(
I just wanted to buy a computer monitor for my face. I'm paying you $600, can't I just have that? :(
Software mentality is eating the world. Investors expect recurring revenue from hardware now.
I hope there's still demand for no-strings-attached hardware. I'm not sure it's a viable marketing point for enough people.
The solution is liability. If you collect data about people, you are responsible for what happens to it. Additionally, If your product fails to work as intended because you intentionally added something separate from the intended purpose (like network spyware for VR hardware), then the product is defective.
We're seeing similar moves in other areas of technology, such as modern cars -- ever more connected, dubious phone-home behaviour, and so on. The "Internet of Things" hype will surely make it much, much worse.
This is not a healthy trend for customers/users, but if entire industries go in that direction because the $$$ signs are too attractive, the practical solution is likely to be statutory regulation.
When it comes to strengthening privacy and data protection in today's highly connected world, I personally have no problem with imposing that regulation. But until more normal (non-geek) people understand the implications and potential abuse of modern data collection and mining practices, until people realise it's not just annoying and slightly creepy ads they have to worry about, I doubt we're going to see a critical mass of popular concern for politicians to act.
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 $800, which people would throw a fit over and not buy. This is also not entirely accurate because the raw price is a one-time purchase, while privacy is hard to upper bound and can even become more valuable later on.
Facebook operates on this extreme: it's completely "free" to use, except you have to count your privacy, which in fact turns out to be quite valuable currency. And unfortunately I think we've established several times that at least for social media or even web or apps in general that the other extreme of "pay us more of your normal$ and less of your privacy$" doesn't work well at all.
So it looks like you can't have a "monitor for your face and that's it" because human psychology.
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
The problem is that they _don't_ offer me the $800 option.
I'd pay that $800.
Well, this makes it easier for me to decide which VR headset to buy.
what are the alternatives?
Do not buy this product. You don't need it. Wait until holographic tech. is implemented without a VR headset. OR you could block specific outgoing traffic that is related to VR software on your router.
HTC Vive is one alternative but it's not out yet.
The HTC Vive is released to the wild April 5th (tomorrow!)
So you pay $600 and you can't even turn that off?
And I thought free to play was bad...
Its a preposterous move in a new market and borderline insulting for a $600 product, but on one level it makes sense; if there's any demographic that's worth aggressively advertising to, its the demographic of people with the money and unrestrained enthusiasm to immediately shell out almost a grand on a first-generation luxury product.
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 Oculus' display. This has been around since the very first prototypes, and since it is a piece of hardware, it's not like they could have gone without.
None of the current titles in the Oculus store have in-game advertising. There's none in the first-party titles, nor in any of the third-party titles that I've tried. Instead, they use the traditional business model: pay up front. They're running a store, called Oculus Home, which competes with Steam. They know which games and experiences you buy on the store, and are probably measuring how many hours you spend in each, like Steam does.
And that's it. This statement from the article is straight up false:
It's false because the Oculus Rift does not contain eye-tracking (only head-orientation tracking); because the software infrastructure for measuring that doesn't exist (though I suppose someone could write it); and because that isn't Oculus' business model.
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 metric if you look at a coke bottle for more than two seconds is pretty minimal.
A metric tool that sends data on how long you keep certain objects within the center of your FOV can be backed with off the shelf free software[1]. The infrastructure is commonplace, well tested and used daily for a myriad of metric related tasks all over the world.
[1] http://grafana.org/
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.
That IS evidence of something shady going on. A display device does not need to send data over the network. This is already spyware.
And no, the endermen in Minecraft do not send data back to Mojang when they detect you looking at them. That was obviously a an example of how someone could exploit head tracking data; it would still require exchanging data with Facebook... which the article claims OVRServer_x64.exe does.
Still waiting for you to admit you were wrong. What's wrong with people like you who cannot admit they were wrong about something?
Then explain to me why this driver needs to phone home.
Your comment completely ignores the context as well: the predilection of companies, Facebook included, has trended towards surveilling their customers at an alarming rate.
The Coke example is possible on the current hardware because head orientation leaks largely the same data.
Are you talking about the privacy aspect i.e the device regularly phoning home and sending data here?
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.
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.
then why is it phoning home? it's not normal for a driver to call home, is it?
yet. you forgot the word yet.
Why does a gimmiky monitor needs internet access. And why any sane person will allow it to pass trough the firewall.
Off topic: this is a horrible web design anti-pattern... a big long page in an iframe that somehow completely messes with my scroll wheel?
No thanks.