<story><title>Oculus &apos;Always On&apos; Services and Privacy Policy May Be a Cause for Concern</title><url>http://uploadvr.com/facebook-oculus-privacy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jimrandomh</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s what&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27; display. This has been around since the very first prototypes, and since it is a piece of hardware, it&amp;#x27;s not like they could have gone without.&lt;p&gt;None of the current titles in the Oculus store have in-game advertising. There&amp;#x27;s none in the first-party titles, nor in any of the third-party titles that I&amp;#x27;ve tried. Instead, they use the traditional business model: pay up front. They&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;And that&amp;#x27;s it. This statement from the article is straight up false:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &amp;quot;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.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s false because the Oculus Rift does not contain eye-tracking (only head-orientation tracking); because the software infrastructure for measuring that doesn&amp;#x27;t exist (though I suppose someone could write it); and because that isn&amp;#x27;t Oculus&amp;#x27; business model.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Sir_Substance</author><text>&amp;gt;because the software infrastructure for measuring that doesn&amp;#x27;t exist (though I suppose someone could write it);&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;grafana.org&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;grafana.org&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Oculus &apos;Always On&apos; Services and Privacy Policy May Be a Cause for Concern</title><url>http://uploadvr.com/facebook-oculus-privacy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jimrandomh</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s what&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27; display. This has been around since the very first prototypes, and since it is a piece of hardware, it&amp;#x27;s not like they could have gone without.&lt;p&gt;None of the current titles in the Oculus store have in-game advertising. There&amp;#x27;s none in the first-party titles, nor in any of the third-party titles that I&amp;#x27;ve tried. Instead, they use the traditional business model: pay up front. They&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;And that&amp;#x27;s it. This statement from the article is straight up false:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &amp;quot;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.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s false because the Oculus Rift does not contain eye-tracking (only head-orientation tracking); because the software infrastructure for measuring that doesn&amp;#x27;t exist (though I suppose someone could write it); and because that isn&amp;#x27;t Oculus&amp;#x27; business model.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TrevorJ</author><text>&amp;gt; it&amp;#x27;s not like they could have gone without.&lt;p&gt;Then explain to me why this driver needs to phone home.&lt;p&gt;Your comment completely ignores the context as well: the predilection of companies, Facebook included, has trended &lt;i&gt;towards&lt;/i&gt; surveilling their customers at an alarming rate.&lt;p&gt;The Coke example &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; possible on the current hardware because head orientation leaks largely the same data.</text></comment>