VR Pioneer Chet Faliszek: Facebook Needs to Change Its User Data Collection Policies for Oculus VR

Above: Oculus' privacy policy clause enabling 3rd party collection of data

Chet Faliszek‏ is a longtime game developer (he co-wrote the Half-Life and the Portal games) who helped drive Valve's development of the HTC-Vive platform when he was with the company. Chet recently published an important Twitter thread (below) that's especially important today, while Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress about the social network's collection and usage of personal data.

I recently posted about Oculus/Facebook and their data collection. Let me go more in depth and this isn’t just about today this is about the future of XR. At the heart of the matter are these points where their privacy policy and actions differ from other XR companies. 1/many

— Chet Faliszek (@chetfaliszek) April 2, 2018

Zuckerberg is promising Congress that the company will make changes to protect user privacy on its social network, but as Chet points out, Facebook's privacy policy for its Oculus VR system allows for much collection of personal data. Notable to me is clause 5 (screencapped above), which allows third parties to collect personal data -- and for Facebook to give personal data directly to other companies. This very much opens up the possibility of a VR-based scenario similar to the one in which Cambridge Analytica scraped personal Facebook data through a third party app to help secretly influence voter opinion the 2016 election.

FB doesn’t have a Hardware guy in charge of Oculus Hardware – instead, they have Boz – an ad guy, a data guy who recently made thoughts on your value as a FB user very clear. And if you are still confused, FB isn’t a social media company, it is a data tracking company. 3/

— Chet Faliszek (@chetfaliszek) April 2, 2018

Equally notable -- Facebook's VR and AR program isn't run by a veteran of virtual reality, but the former director of Facebook's ad program. (Andrew Bosworth, who notoriously wrote an internal Facebook memo saying growth of the social network is justified at all costs.)

"This isn’t to say throw out your Oculus Rift," Chet writes. "This isn’t to say they can’t change – but right now today – they need to remove that language from their privacy policy and put in place policies not that protect that data – but don’t collect it." 

Just as important, I would add, is for the VR industry and VR consumers to devote as much scrutiny to Facebook's Oculus as we all are to Facebook's social network.

Read Chet's full thread below or after the break.

So it isn’t just Facebook and what they will do with this data, but this data’s existence is a threat to our privacy and freedom.Facebook has done more than above, there are more scenarios. They have also apologized for the above and yet continue doing many of these things.
13/

— Chet Faliszek (@chetfaliszek) April 2, 2018

Until then, when they say they are serious about privacy? They clearly aren’t. A privacy policy itself is just a list of privacy violations. Really caring means not collecting the data in the first place. As users or employees of FB – request they change this policy now.
15/

— Chet Faliszek (@chetfaliszek) April 2, 2018

Comments

[sirhc desantis]

' "This isn’t to say throw out your Oculus Rift," Chet writes. '
Phew thats a relief I was worried... oh wait. I forgot I don't have one despite being offered a job lot for a few hours work last week.

Nice tie in to worlds adrift though so kudos there.

I have not witnessed an industry so prone to car wrecks since the UK errr car making shambles in the 70's. I spent some time as a serf at Vauxhall.

Perhaps we should rename the Zuckerberg spin as the Chet Defence (apologies to South Park and Chewie).

[David Cartier]

I finally deleted my (real) Facebook account last week, and become more and more certain that I did the right thing. I killed my Twitter account a while back, when they began their apalling fascist censorship of anything even slightly controversial. In my case the people whom Facebook was recommending as potential "friends" made it very clear to me that Facebook engages in widespread spying - not only our words and actions within Facebook, iteself, but also our emails and activities in other social media and games. The fact that it's not even worth the trouble to delete my Skype and LinkedIn accounts just says a lot about the basic mediocrity of Microsoft.

[sirhc desantis]

I stand corrected (actually clawed)
https://www.designboom.com/technology/cat-vr-isobar-04-12-2018/?utm_source=designboom+daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=no+cats+were