Is Virtual Reality Bringing Uninvited Eyes Into Your Home? And Should You Care?

Virtual Reality (VR) has exploded as a form of media in recent years, creating an industry that is expected to be worth 18.8 billion dollars by the end of 2020, which alone is a 78% increase in spending than 2019[1]. With the explosion of the industry, there have been some questions raised about the privacy of this new technology, as it goes beyond a 2D screen and introduces users to a new (virtual) world around them, and thus brings a lot of new data to the table that was previously unobtainable. This article looks at the privacy issues that have begun to arise as “Big Data” companies are getting more interested into these new and valuable devices entering users’ houses.

For the last few years, increasingly more people have been inviting big data companies to come live in their homes and harvest data about them via purchasing smart home devices and virtual assistants, like Google Assistant, Amazon Echo, or Apple’s Siri, to help run the operations of their house. The introduction of these virtual assistants into your home begs the ethical question of how private your private spaces really are. These devices have a history of harvesting a surplus of personal data from their different sensors and microphones, and sending that data to the cloud for various processing — albeit for your own services or someone else’s; but the technology world operates under the ethical theory of consequentialism, or the theory that deciding whether an action is “right or wrong” depends on the consequences of the action. Perhaps uncoincidentally, one of the biggest investors in the virtual reality market is Facebook with all their negative reputation about data collection and privacy trailing closely behind. VR consumers are wondering what their involvement with the industry means for their personal data with the release of Facebook’s Oculus Quest 2, which requires a mandatory Facebook login to use the device.

Since there haven’t been many publicized data breaches or privacy leaks from virtual assistant devices, the only consequence users have run into with them have been the positive consequences of the convenience they add in managing their homes. Much like the smart home industry, virtual reality has recently exploded in popularity with devices that carry many of the same features and worries, like Facebook’s Oculus Quest and Quest 2, VR headsets that have an array of cameras that scan your room for tracking your position in the virtual world and microphones to analyze and transmit your voice. Facebook claims that it isn’t taking any data from your homes and that it doesn’t need to for the device to function, but can we trust another “big data” company with devices that literally control what world we are in? And frankly, in the age of social media, search engines, and smart phones, should we even care?

Virtual reality has long been a pipe dream for businesses and technology enthusiasts everywhere — a promising technology that goes beyond the screens we look at from a distance or hold in our hands, rather, creating an entirely new, 3D, immersive world for users to view and interact with — but has sadly been contained to sci-fi movies and several failed projects until recent years. Other than a handful of start-up companies that saw a future in VR, it never seemed to see the light of Silicon Valley’s tech giants, who arguably make or break new technologies — until Facebook bought Oculus VR, a wildly successful VR Kickstarter company promising consumer VR gaming devices, in 2014. VR finally had its first serious investor that could take it to the big leagues, but many were skeptical that it was the company with arguably one of the worst reputations regarding data collection and privacy towards its users.

In 2016, VR got its first shred of attention in years. Two of the first consumer model VR systems, the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, released for around $800. This may seem like a high price, because it is, and it doesn’t include the $1000 PC that was required to run these systems. But these were the first versions that showed promise of what was to come — fully immersive virtual worlds that you could walk around in, use your hands to interact with things, and do things that aren’t possible in real life. While these systems didn’t sell record numbers, they showed the amazing potential that VR had whenever the price of the technology decreased — and Facebook, who owned Oculus, decided that that was their goal: to create a high quality VR experience for as cheap as possible with the end goal of getting 1 billion people into VR.

Facebook has made considerable progress in lowering the cost for quality VR with the release of two of its best headsets: the original Oculus Quest in 2019, and the Oculus Quest 2 released in October of 2020, released for $399 and just $299 respectively. These headsets are an all-in-one device, which means with the low price of $299 you get everything you need to get into VR: the headset, the controllers, and a powerful mobile system-on-chip that runs a custom Oculus version of Android. No longer needed are the cables, external trackers, and the expensive PC to run the headset as it is a self-contained device. This low price, along with Facebook’s continuous investment into quality content for these devices, has caused one of the biggest surges in VR’s popularity as high-quality VR is now affordable for the masses.

However, there is one caveat — these are Facebook devices that require users to log into their Facebook account to use these devices. You don’t have to be a technology enthusiast to know that Facebook has had a rocky past with data privacy, even going so far as having gone to the U.S. Supreme Court over their misuse of user’s data in elections[2]. These VR devices, much like the virtual assistants and smart homes people buy every day, have an array of sensors and microphones used to provide this VR experience. The Quest series in particular has an array of cameras that generate a 3D model of the environment it is in to accurately track a user’s position in the world, which has raised questions about how Facebook is using these cameras. Facebook currently claims that all the image processing is done on the headsets, saying: “We don’t collect and store images or 3D maps of your environment on our servers today,” but the wording of that statement leaves the future up for change[3].

So what does this mean for consumers right now? Well, right now it means that as long as they are okay with signing into their Facebook account to get access to one of the best VR experiences available, then that means they get exactly that for a reasonable price. But this privacy policy Facebook has implemented is similar to that of the smart home virtual assistants that people have been adopting for years. The main difference, for now, is the virtual assistants, such as Alexa and Google Assistant, already rely on sending your data to the cloud for processing, where the Facebook headsets do not (yet). Despite how eerie it is to know your voice and data about your home is stored in some cloud server somewhere, it isn’t scary enough to impact the sale of these devices at all. What’s different about the VR headsets, however, is how personal the data that can be collected from VR systems can be. A recent study from Stanford resulted in the creation of a program that, from a pool of 511 participants, could correctly identify individuals based off of raw head and hand movement data 95% of the time — and that’s without Facebook’s scary 3D-camera-scanning technology[4]. This system can learn how individuals react to different stimuli and what specifically grabs their attention based off the participants’ small, subconscious movements alone. While Facebook is not currently collecting camera data from their users, they can already gather a lot more personalized data from a few minutes in a VR headset than they can via other methods. Whenever Facebook decides to flip the switch and make the millions of Quest devices send 3D scans of people’s environments to the cloud, then the data they will have may be some of the most valuable data on the market.

So what does this mean for consumers — in the future? And should you, the reader, care? To answer this question, let’s look again at the virtual assistants, a technology that people have continued to adopt despite the (rather serious) privacy concerns. While some may find it alarming that their voice is being recorded and analyzed somewhere else in the world where various parties could get access to it, it’s not scary enough for people to stop buying these devices. This is probably due to the fact that there haven’t been many breaches of privacy that we know of for these devices; there haven’t been any widely publicized cases where someone got access to Amazon’s billions of voice recordings from their Echo devices. We know that technology tends to operate under the ethical theory of consequentialism, which means that since the only noticeable consequence for these devices so far has been the convenience they provide in their homes, most people are fine with the policies these big data companies use. The same applies to Facebook in VR as well, at least for now. They aren’t collecting an immense amount of data (as far as we know) from their headsets, and again, as far as we know, the data they are collecting is only being used to serve more relevant ads on their website. So that is a noticeable consequence, more or less, but the biggest consequence of Facebook’s investment in VR is the creation of the cheapest, yet some of the highest quality VR hardware the market has ever seen. While I wouldn’t personally pick Facebook of all companies to take charge in furthering the VR industry, they have done the most to innovate in the accessibility of the technology, whether you like it or not.

To finally answer the question of whether or not we should care about Facebook’s meddling with VR — no, I don’t think so — not yet. Technology and its consumers have always acted according to the ethical theory of consequentialism; unless there is a major flaw or privacy breach with a product or service, most people don’t care as long as it provides some sort of value in their lives. It is understandable to worry about Facebook being tied to your VR experience and building a more detailed digital profile about you, but in an age where everyone is on social media sites like Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram (another Facebook company) anyways, there is little that the data giants don’t already know about you. If you don’t like what Facebook is doing but want to get into VR, there are plenty of other options for VR systems, albeit at the time of writing most rely on a powerful PC to run. Big Data is already in our homes as well, as the adoption of virtual assistants and smart home technology increases, and with the policies currently in place for Facebook’s VR data collection, adding a VR system to your home wouldn’t be more invasive than buying another smart speaker. Until there is a major privacy breach or otherwise negative consequence for using Facebook’s hardware, you can find me playing games and watching movies in my Oculus Quest 2, and I hope to see you somewhere in the metaverse as well.

[1] Statistica. November 2019, “Forecast augmented (AR) and virtual reality (VR) market size worldwide from 2016 to 2020.”

[2] Criddle, C. October 28, 2020, “Facebook sued over Cambridge Analytica data scandal.”

[3] Lang, B. August 6, 2019, “Here’s What Facebook Says About Camera Privacy on Quest & Rift S.”

[4] Hayden, S. November 2, 2020, “Stanford Research Shows VR Users Can Be Identified Using Only 5 Minutes of Motion Data.”