Image via Meta
Meta has unveiled its latest VR headset this week. The Meta Quest Pro will be running at a price of $1,500, with Meta promising that it can change the future of collaboration online and remote work.
The Meta Quest Pro is geared towards working professionals that want to use VR for productivity purposes, which is why Meta designed it to have more cameras and better body and facial tracking.
Although these things sound promising for the future of online collaboration and the Metaverse, a new report from Wired seems to show that there may be many privacy concerns and data collection issues with the Meta Quest Pro.
The Meta Quest Pro has 16 total cameras compared to the Meta Quest 2’s four built-in infrareds. The Quest Pro has five cameras in the interior and five on the exterior, along with three on each Touch Pro controller.
Supposedly, the interior cameras are meant to allow for better facial and eye tracking, which can translate to more realistic expressions on a Metaverse avatar. The external cameras are meant to allow better body tracking to allow for realistic movements to be copied from the real world.
With the addition of extra cameras, Meta can now know pretty much everything about your surroundings and your facial movements and your eye movements.
However, where the biggest privacy concern comes from is that eye tracking data will actually be shared with third-party apps. Meta is adding an eye-tracking icon next to apps that support this feature.
Raw image data from eye tracking is processed in real time on the Quest Pro and deleted once it’s finished processing, meaning that Meta won’t store raw eye tracking image data on its servers. Wired did point out though that “insights gleaned from those images may be processed and stored on Meta servers.”
The Quest Pro launches on October 25 and will have face tracking off by default. Western University assistant professor Luke Stark spoke with Wired and believes that having it off by default will likely not last.
One of the biggest features of the Quest Pro is the Natural Facial Expressions, which use the five interior cameras to estimate how your face is moving and then have the avatar mimic them. If someone else does use your headset while this feature is enabled, “the raw image data and abstracted facial expressions data from such person may also be processed” unless the feature is disabled.
During the announcement event for the Quest Pro, Mark Zuckerberg said that “our nonverbal expressions and gestures are often more important than what we say, and the way we connect virtually needs to reflect that too.”
Meta will have more access to personal data, but in exchange, users get more realistic interactions. With all the recent security breaches and hacks against major tech corporations, it’s always possible that facial recognition data could be breached or leaked by malicious third parties.
Wired argues that this type of data could be used to exploit people in VR. Marketing companies could use data to show users extremely relevant ads to the point where users may not even recognize them to be ads in the first place.
It’s always important to practice good safety online and to know where your data is going and what data is being taken. Always ensure that you are aware of what agreements you’re signing and make sure that you don’t give away too much personal information online.
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