Facebook declared it will stop offering to automatically tag individuals in pictures and videos and remove facial recognition data gleaned from photographs of more than 1 billion users. Luke Stark, an assistant professor at Western University in Canada, said at the time that he thought the policy change was a PR ploy because the company’s drive into virtual reality will probably result in the expansion of physiological data collecting and create fresh privacy issues.
Stark’s forecast came true this week. The Quest Pro is the most recent VR headset from Meta, the business that produced Facebook. The updated design includes five inward-facing cameras that capture a user’s facial expressions and eye movements. This enables an avatar to reflect the user’s emotions in real time by grinning, winking, or raising an eyebrow. Avatars will eventually have legs that mimic a person’s motions in the real world thanks to the headset’s five outside cameras.
Stark claimed the result was foreseeable following Meta’s presentation. And he believes that the face tracking default “off” setting won’t continue for long. He said that animated avatars have been operating as privacy loss leaders for some time. “This information is far more detailed and intimate than a face in a picture.”
The CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, highlighted the private new data collecting as an essential component of his vision for virtual reality during the ceremony launching the new headgear. The way we interact online has to reflect that as well since “all our nonverbal reactions and gestures are frequently much more essential than what we say when we communicate.”
In addition, Zuckerberg said that the Quest Pro’s internal cameras, along with the cameras in its controllers, will enable lifelike avatars that resemble actual people rather than cartoon characters. The release date for the feature was not specified. This summer, a VR selfie of Zuckerberg’s cartoonish avatar, which he later confessed was “basic,” went viral, leading Meta to modify its avatars.
Despite a lack of proof that the technology can be effective, companies like Amazon and numerous research initiatives have in the past utilised standard photographs of faces to attempt to anticipate a person’s emotional state. A new technique to infer someone’s interests or responses to information may be possible using data from Meta’s new headgear. The business is experimenting with virtual reality shopping and has applied for patents that describe tailored adverts in the metaverse and media material that responds to a user’s facial expressions.
