The New Tech With Frightening Insight into Our Psyches and Identities: Virtual Reality
Imagine this: Within five minutes of meeting you, a stranger gains insight into your most intimate emotions and preferences, predicts your future behavior, and can even diagnose your disposition to anxiety. The ability to access such personal information seems like science fiction. However, modern technology makes these capabilities possible today.
Virtual reality, or VR, technology is a powerful tool that immerses people in simulated environments. You’ve probably heard of VR in the context of gaming. By holding motion controllers and donning headsets, players are transported to thrilling virtual worlds that they can engage with and explore. Take, for example, this VR game that immerses players in a zombie apocalypse.
VR has a variety of applications outside of gaming, too: it’s been harnessed for environmental activism, remote learning, and workplace productivity and training. It’s also being leveraged to predict dementia, anxiety, depression, addiction, and autism spectrum disorder.
VR undoubtedly offers an impressive and exciting array of applications. But how? The answer: huge swaths of personal data. Specifically, biometrics are collected and used to create these immersive, versatile experiences.
The Data That Drives VR
Biometric data are physical and behavioral measurements drawn from humans. VR technology collects this information, including such elements as retinal and body movement data, to seamlessly immerse users in virtual worlds.
Biometric data collected by VR technology can also be used for identification and authentication purposes. This data can create unique “digital signatures” that identify users with startling precision. A study showed that after being used for five minutes, a VR headset could accurately identify users 95% of the time based on collected biometric data. After being trained for longer periods, the VR headset could recognize users at rates of precision similar to fingerprints.
Biometric data can also create “psychometric profiles.” Eye-tracking information, for example, can reveal users’ likes and dislikes, emotions, subconscious attitudes, and where their attention is focused. This psychological data can be incredibly lucrative and powerful. In particular, it’s a goldmine for advertisers hoping to more accurately predict buying preferences and behavior.
So, What’s the Big Deal?
VR presents us with fascinating opportunities — ranging from video game escapism to new workplace collaboration methods — but also poses serious data privacy risks. Without protection and regulation, biometric data could provide strangers with an intimate understanding of our physical and psychological characteristics that can be leveraged in unsettling ways.
Malicious actors could steal identities by accessing “digital signatures” and other personally identifiable information. Marketers could craft unwanted and more manipulative advertisements by analyzing people’s “psychometric profiles.” Even insurance companies could harness this biometric data to unfairly adjust premiums and discriminate against customers.
Biometric data is undoubtedly lucrative and alluring to many. Left in the wrong hands it can be used to violate people’s privacy and control over their identities. As the VR industry continues to expand, these concerns must be addressed to safeguard consumers, ensure their intimate data isn’t compromised, and set an early precedent for consumer VR privacy.
Introducing Oculus Quest 2: Exciting or Terrifying?
Facebook, a dominant force in the VR consumer market, launched the Oculus Quest 2 last fall. Oculus is a VR headset aiming to provide both immersive gaming and social media experiences. However, Facebook’s history of privacy scandals (such as its 2014 mood-manipulation experiments on users and the Cambridge Analytica data breach) has raised concerns about how they’ll handle the sensitive biometric data necessary to power their VR products.
In addition to Facebook’s less-than-ideal track record with privacy, users are required to sign in with their Facebook accounts to use the headset. Mandatory sign-in forces all Oculus users into the Facebook ecosystem. People’s online activity is already meticulously tracked by Facebook; similar data collection practices could easily be applied to Oculus users logging in via their Facebook accounts to gather more sensitive biometric information.
Finally, Facebook is existentially motivated to collect and sell such data. It generates the majority of its profit from user data and advertisements. Facebook’s business model begs the question: How will the new and highly lucrative data from Oculus be used?
Where We Go From Here
As the VR market opens up to the general public with products like Oculus 2, it’s evident that data privacy standards in the VR space are desperately needed. Privacy measures must be established early on or there will be irreversible consequences where people lose complete autonomy over their identities and personal information.
Privacy and industry experts gathering at a 2018 Stanford University summit brainstormed solutions to these VR privacy concerns. They suggested limiting the collection and storage of sensitive data on headsets, transparent data use policies, and categorizing biometric data as health data to make it legally protected.
Experts also advocated for non-mandatory social media sign-in for VR products, or alternative sign-in methods for users not wanting to share their data across digital ecosystems. Here’s where humanID comes in.
humanID is a secure single sign-on tool, serving as an alternative to social media sign-in methods like Facebook Login. It allows users to maintain complete privacy and anonymity, while also protecting platforms from spam and bots. humanID can be an effective alternative to social media sign-in and could play an essential role in bolstering VR privacy as a whole.
The humanID secure login is a critical tool today that promises to play an increasingly important role as technologies like VR evolve and become more pervasive. The humanID secure login can help protect individual privacy and, perhaps just as important, sends a message to the industry that respect for privacy is crucial.
What’s humanID?
humanID is a new anonymous online identity that blocks bots and social media manipulation. If you care about privacy and protecting free speech, consider supporting humanID at www.human-id.org, and follow us on Twitter & LinkedIn.
All opinions and views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of humanID.
