Vice has an in-depth and incredibly important essay by Avi Bar-Zeev, one of VR's leading pioneers -- a co-inventor of Microsoft HoloLens, and over the last couple decades, a lead developer of VR/virtual world projects at Apple, Amazon, MS/HoloLens, Linden Lab, Google Earth, and Disney. And as Bar-Zeev carefully explains, the consumer launch of virtual reality has opened up a Pandora's Box in which companies like Oculus and Vive will soon gain access, through eye tracking and other data mining, and incredible amount of knowledge of its users -- and consequently, unprecedented power to influence or even manipulate them. And at some point, VR companies are almost certain to abuse this power. As he explains:
Eventually, without corrective forces, [VR] companies will make decisions that lower their own [user privacy] safeguards. It’s the business model, not the ethics of employees, that matters most...
In The Matrix, fictional AIs would occasionally alter the virtual world to further their oppressive goals. But even the Agents didn’t use the more sophisticated techniques we’re discussing here. In real life, people won’t be used as batteries. We’ll more likely be plugged in as abstract computational nodes, our attention and product-buying decisions channeling the flow of trillions of dollars of commerce; our free will up for grabs to the most ‘persuasive’ bidders.
The potential to use VR-based data mining against its own users is very well known within the industry, but is rarely brought up by the tech/VR press, let alone by VR consumers -- even though, just a mere three years ago, Oculus owner Facebook enabled a data mining scandal which quite literally helped changed the direction of world history.
"My best guess is that the tech press figures people aren’t interested, so they don’t write about it, which minimizes interest," Bar-Zeev tells me. "Also, VR enthusiasts have to endure a lot of pain to get an early 'fix' today, so maybe they’re a lot less picky about what form it takes. Maybe they assume that any exploitation of their data is not yet happening."
However, he adds: "These would all be rationalizations, in my opinion, because unrepentant data collected today can be used against them later. The easiest time to fix this is now. But people don’t see the crisis yet."
To start addressing this crisis, here's a question that Avi Bar-Zeev recommends that the press and consumers starting asking VR manufacturers now:
