Meta’s new virtual reality headset, the Quest Pro, is not even out yet and it’s raising some serious privacy concerns. The new VR tech is equipped with internal cameras that record your facial movements to collect data for the Metaverse.
Facial recognition embodies the pinnacle of society’s concerns with online privacy. But the largest facial recognition system until 2021 was Facebook’s, and now it seems that Meta continues to carry the torch.
Mark Zuckerberg continues to push for the Metaverse using the Quest Pro to replicate users’ facial expressions in the virtual reality world. This means millions of Quest Pro users will have their faces tracked and recorded.
How will Meta benefit from face recognition data? Will the social media giant develop databases, content, and features based on our facial expressions? The possibilities spark a concerning outlook.
Facebook Trained a Face Recognition AI for Years
In 2021, Facebook promised to shut down its face recognition tech. The social media platform has automatically detected and identified people in images and videos since 2010. Throughout the 2010s, the company gathered data on more than a billion Facebook users, and that’s despite the years of criticism from government regulators and privacy experts. Facebook also promised to delete the data it gathered on all of its users, but there was a catch.
Despite deleting the data it gathered, the company kept DeepFace, an AI face recognition model that was trained using the very same data. DeepFace was a major breakthrough. It had access to the largest dataset of facial images and it achieved near human-level facial recognition abilities.
Cybersecurity experts and privacy advocates raised concerns about the threat such a tool poses to our civil liberties, but the US Congress didn’t push for any kind of regulations against it. One group of activists, known as Fight for the Future, said:
This technology will enable authoritarian governments to target and crack down on religious minorities and political dissent; it will automate the funneling of people into prisons without making us safer; it will create new tools for stalking, abuse, and identity theft.
The Quest Pro VR headset uses a similar machine learning model for its face tracking abilities, but it’s yet unconfirmed if, indeed, DeepFace is the one behind it. Nonetheless, the functionality and privacy risks are the same.
Mark Zuckerberg Says Facial Tracking Is Necessary
Meta’s CEO described the physiological data collection as necessary for the fulfillment of his vision for the Metaverse. The headset’s internal cameras gather data to generate lifelike avatars that replicate the user’s facial expressions. Zuckerberg said:
When we communicate, all our nonverbal expressions and gestures are often even more important than what we say, and the way we connect virtually needs to reflect that too.
But is that data also stored and used in any other way? According to Meta, the raw facial photos are stored on the headset itself and deleted once they’re used to generate an action. However, anything that was learned from those images can be stored on Meta’s servers. To make matters worse, Meta’s own privacy policy of its VR headsets raises even more privacy concerns.
The information from the Quest Pro can be sent to third parties. Developers from other companies can gain access to the face recognition data and, once there, that information “will be subject to their own terms and privacy policies.”
Exploiting Quest Pro Users’ Emotions to Deliver Ads?
Facebook, which is owned by Meta, is famous for harvesting user data to improve its advertising platform. Additionally, Meta filed a number of patents for VR shopping and Metaverse-personalized ads that adapt to the user’s reactions. This means the company intends to extend its advertising empire to virtual reality and use the facial data to deliver content based on how you feel.
Avi Bar-Zeev, a consultant who worked on the HoloLens headset from Microsoft, shares his concerns regarding emotional exploitation inside VR:
My concern is not that we’re going to be served a bunch of ads that we hate… My concern is that they’re going to know so much about us that they’re going to serve us a bunch of ads that we love, and we’re not even going to know that they’re ads.
With Facebook’s scandal-riddled background, Meta’s not-so-privacy-focused privacy policy, and face recognition AI, we should definitely worry about our data and privacy.
Protect Your Privacy and Personal Data
Data is the new currency. With the growth of VR tech, companies like Meta are starting to look into new data harvesting methods. Your face and your emotional reactions to visual stimuli can yield valuable information about your experience with certain content. It’s time to take your privacy into your own hands before you start living in a Black Mirror episode.
Stop using software and devices that openly breach your privacy. Take a more active approach in identifying the companies that want to exploit you, and encrypt your connection with a VPN to prevent anything from leaking out. Also, consider permanently deleting Facebook to eliminate the bulk of your privacy concerns.
Use CyberGhost VPN to secure all of your devices. We route your connection through heavily encrypted servers and we don’t log your private data. Connect to the web from on any network without being compromised.
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