Meta’s VR Headset Harvests Personal Data Right Off Your Face
Originally published at Wired.com
In November 2021, Facebook announced it would delete face recognition data extracted from images of more than 1 billion people and stop offering to automatically tag people in photos and videos. A lot of people saw this as a PR tactic more than a genuine change in their privacy policies.
This week, it seems the prediction proved right. Meta, as the company that built Facebook is now called, introduced its latest VR headset, the Quest Pro. The new model adds a set of five inward-facing cameras that watch a person’s face to track eye movements and facial expressions, allowing an avatar to reflect their expressions, smiling, winking, or raising an eyebrow in real-time. The headset also has five exterior cameras that will in the future help give avatars legs that copy a person’s movements in the real world.
The new model adds a set of five inward-facing cameras that watch a person’s face to track eye movements and facial expressions, allowing an avatar to reflect their expressions, smiling, winking, or raising an eyebrow in real time. The headset also has five exterior cameras that will in the future help give avatars legs that copy a person’s movements in the real world.
Cameras inside the device that track eye and face movements can make an avatar’s expressions more realistic, but they raise new privacy questions.
