Facebook would like to know a little more about you. In an email sent to users of the Quest helmetsMeta details the new data she would like to collect.
Are you ready to reveal a little more of your life to Facebook and Instagram? Mark Zuckerberg hopes so. In an email sent very recently to owners of Quest VR headsets, Meta details a new data collection policy that is significantly more intrusive than the old one. Soon, the company could be peeking right inside your home.
Meta collects more and more data
Currently, Meta just collects “ldata necessary for proper functioning» of the helmet, specifies the company. But with the next update, the firm will also start collecting “anonymized data» without specifying which ones. As noted by Ars Technica, however, the “Meta Platforms Technologies Supplemental Privacy Policy” tells us a little more about what data might be affected by this change.
The page details a lot of new information that the company could collect on “physical characteristics and movements» from users of Meta headsets. These include, among other things, “thethe position and orientation of your headset and controllers to determine your body position“, of the “audio data, when your microphone is activated» and “shand and body tracking» if you activate the appropriate functionality.
Even more worrying, Meta reserves the right to collect, always anonymously, information on “eye tracking“, on the “natural facial expressions” And “the physical form” as well as on top “your physical environment and its dimensions […] For example information about the size of walls, surfaces and objects in your room“. Enough to establish a very precise portrait of you and your environment in short.
Data… not so anonymous?
Meta would like to remind you that all this information is not directly linked to your profile, that it is anonymized and used only for “improve the user experience and Meta Quest products for everyone“. However, the amount of data collected could make deanonymization easy for anyone seeking to build a complete profile of a user, as numerous experiments with supposedly anonymous data have shown.
This problem of data exploitation is not new. Already in 2021, Meta launched a Quest 2 that could be used without a Facebook account… which cost 400 dollars more than the general public model. A hefty tax to protect your privacy.
Source : Meta via Ars Technica
Meta Quest 3
VR headset
release date: 10-10-2023
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