<story><title>Facebook’s Surveillance Machine</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/opinion/facebook-cambridge-analytica.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mliker</author><text>VR hasn’t taken off as promised and the hype is dying down now. The headset is too clunky in its current incarnation. People view it as a novelty item rather than a useful tool, so I’m inclined to believe this won’t be the massive surveillance tool VR proponents think it’ll be.</text></item><item><author>gfodor</author><text>I was one of the co-founders of an early social VR startup and observed first hand the technical capabilities that these applications will afford bad actors to use for surveillance. You can easily capture voice, body tracking, and interaction data, and basically record a full view of the world through the eyes of another human being. It&amp;#x27;s quite remarkable being able to record and play back a copy of yourself in seconds from a remote server, but the potential for abuse is immense.&lt;p&gt;Facebook&amp;#x27;s made a move, probably the biggest move of any company, into VR. They bought Oculus for $2B while everyone else was scratching their heads. Social VR is their focus at Facebook proper, and they are leaving the &lt;i&gt;entire&lt;/i&gt; rest of the VR ecosystem to their subsidiary Oculus. Isn&amp;#x27;t it obvious why? VR, if it becomes the dominant form of human communication, will make their current surveillance machine look like a joke. Facebook would be in a position to be an intermediary for every human interaction on earth that doesn&amp;#x27;t take place in physical space. It&amp;#x27;s nice to see the public become aware of what they&amp;#x27;ve done before they are able to take it to the next level of nearly being inside of our heads.&lt;p&gt;This is the primary underlying motivation for why we are working on building an alternative open communication platform for Mixed Reality at Mozilla. We&amp;#x27;re heads down building stuff now but you can expect to see us shipping things soon.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.mozvr.com&amp;#x2F;enabling-the-social-3d-web&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.mozvr.com&amp;#x2F;enabling-the-social-3d-web&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>3pt14159</author><text>Eh, it&amp;#x27;s still in the palm-pilot phase. They&amp;#x27;ll figure it out quietly over the next 10 years. Machine learning will help figure out what to pull into the headset (things you&amp;#x27;re about to walk into) or it will intelligently make the game world similar enough in your immediate surroundings to where you don&amp;#x27;t hit stuff. I could see people hanging out at parks or beaches with these things on. Even going for a swim if the headset is waterproof enough. It will just take decades of work to get there.</text></comment>
<story><title>Facebook’s Surveillance Machine</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/opinion/facebook-cambridge-analytica.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mliker</author><text>VR hasn’t taken off as promised and the hype is dying down now. The headset is too clunky in its current incarnation. People view it as a novelty item rather than a useful tool, so I’m inclined to believe this won’t be the massive surveillance tool VR proponents think it’ll be.</text></item><item><author>gfodor</author><text>I was one of the co-founders of an early social VR startup and observed first hand the technical capabilities that these applications will afford bad actors to use for surveillance. You can easily capture voice, body tracking, and interaction data, and basically record a full view of the world through the eyes of another human being. It&amp;#x27;s quite remarkable being able to record and play back a copy of yourself in seconds from a remote server, but the potential for abuse is immense.&lt;p&gt;Facebook&amp;#x27;s made a move, probably the biggest move of any company, into VR. They bought Oculus for $2B while everyone else was scratching their heads. Social VR is their focus at Facebook proper, and they are leaving the &lt;i&gt;entire&lt;/i&gt; rest of the VR ecosystem to their subsidiary Oculus. Isn&amp;#x27;t it obvious why? VR, if it becomes the dominant form of human communication, will make their current surveillance machine look like a joke. Facebook would be in a position to be an intermediary for every human interaction on earth that doesn&amp;#x27;t take place in physical space. It&amp;#x27;s nice to see the public become aware of what they&amp;#x27;ve done before they are able to take it to the next level of nearly being inside of our heads.&lt;p&gt;This is the primary underlying motivation for why we are working on building an alternative open communication platform for Mixed Reality at Mozilla. We&amp;#x27;re heads down building stuff now but you can expect to see us shipping things soon.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.mozvr.com&amp;#x2F;enabling-the-social-3d-web&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.mozvr.com&amp;#x2F;enabling-the-social-3d-web&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>washadjeffmad</author><text>The commercial products aren&amp;#x27;t representational of the limits of the form, just what&amp;#x27;s currently economically feasible to produce and sell.&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;ve got to have a market first, and affordable entry-level VR is damn good way to generate interest.</text></comment>