VR Biometric Data is Not Personally Identifiable (Yet)
There are some existing biometric identifiers that can connect information gathered from your body that can personally identify you, which include things like facial features, fingerprint, hand geometry, retina, iris, gait, signature, vein patterns, DNA, voice, and typing rhythm. Right now your gait, voices, or retina or iris as captured by an eye tracking camera could be biometric data that proves to be personally identifiable. It’s also likely that the combination of other factors like your body, hand, and head movements taken together may prove to create a unique kinematic fingerprint that could also personally identifiable you with the proper machine learning algorithm. This could mean data is being anonymously stored today that could eventually be aggregated to personally identify you, which is a special class of PII that requires special legal protections.
OpenBCI co-founder Conor Russomanno told me that EEG brainwave data may turn out to have a unique fingerprint that can not ever fully be anonymized and could be potentially be tracked back to individuals. What are the implications of storing massive troves of physical data gathered from VR headsets and hand tracked controllers that turns out to be personally identifiable? Downey suggests that the best answer from a privacy perspective is to not record and store the information in the first place.
VR Companies Are Not Being Proactive with Privacy
There’s a set of self-regulatory principles for online behavioral advertising that companies have collectively agreed to follow to help with the Federal Trade Commission’s oversight of companies protecting the privacy of individuals. But up to this point all of the major virtual reality companies have not taken a proactive approach to educate, be transparent and provide consumer controls to opt-out of what may be recorded and stored from a VR system.
Google has the most detailed privacy Dashboard to be able to review and control what they’ve recorded from your regular account (included interactive maps of location history and voice recordings of talking to Google Assistant), but they don’t have any specific information related to virtual reality yet. You can see what ad preference categories that Facebook has selected for you, but their Privacy Policy explanation page shows very little of the raw data that they’ve collected. The HTC Vive links to HTC’s privacy policy, which hasn’t been updated since September 29, 2014 and predates the Vive so there’s no specific VR information. And there’s no specific indication of VR data being capturing or tracked in Valve’s or Samsung’s privacy policy.
Oculus’ Privacy Policy is the only one to call out any specific VR data being collected, which means that either other companies aren’t recording any head or hand tracked information yet, or they’re not properly disclosing the fact that they are.
Oculus’ Independence from Facebook is Fading
The site VRHeads did a great comparison of the different privacy policies of VR companies pointing out some of the commonalities and differences. They also flagged Oculus’ privacy as concerning saying, “The company states that all of that information is necessary to help make your game experience more immersive; they also use the data to make improvements on future games. But permanently storing that data, and then sharing it? That’s a bit invasive.”
Oculus made this statement about privacy in response to an UploadVR report from April, 2016:
We want to create the absolute best VR experience for people, and to do that, we need to understand how our products are being used and we’re thinking about privacy every step of the way. The Oculus privacy policy was drafted so we could be very clear with the people who use our services about the ways we receive or collect information, and how we may use it. For example, one thing we may do is use information to improve our services and to make sure everything is working properly — such as checking device stability and addressing technical issues to improve the overall experience.
Lastly, Facebook owns Oculus and helps run some Oculus services, such as elements of our infrastructure, but we’re not sharing information with Facebook at this time. We don’t have advertising yet and Facebook is not using Oculus data for advertising – though these are things we may consider in the future.
Just because Oculus hasn’t shared information with Facebook as of early 2016, that doesn’t mean that they won’t and they don’t plan to in the near or far future. In fact, it’s likely that they will otherwise they wouldn’t have included the legal language to do so.
The boundaries of independence between Oculus and Facebook have been fading lately. Facebook has been taking more and more of an active part in running Oculus as shown by the Oculus logo including mention of Facebook, with CEO Brendan Iribe recently stepping down, and with Mark Zuckerberg giving a much more in-depth demo about the future of VR and Facebook at the recent Oculus Connect 3.
Any early comfort that Oculus would be run as an independent company from within Facebook is starting to fade, and the bottom line is that there’s nothing stopping Oculus from feeding as much intimate data about body movements into Facebook’s unified super profiles of personally identifiable users. It’s starting with physical movements, but it’s likely that future generations of VR technology will have deeper tracking technologies built in, like eye tracking and biometric sensors. Oculus’ privacy policy is laying down the legal framework to be able to capture and store everything you look at and interact with in virtual worlds; these policies will increasingly matter as VR becomes a more important part of our lives.
The Metaverse as the Last Bastion of Privacy?
As these online profiles start to merge into our real world with augmented reality technologies, it could vastly reduce our sense of privacy. So Downey is optimistic about the potential of a virtual reality metaverse could become one of the last bastions of privacy that we have, if VR technologies are architected with privacy in mind.
Downey encourages VR application and hardware developers to minimize data collection and to maintain as little data as possible. She also suggests to not personally identify people, and to use decentralized payment options like Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies as to not tie information back to a singular identity. Finally to avoid using social sign-ins so as to not have people’s actions be tied back to a persistent identity that’s permanent stored and shared forever.
Open Questions to VR Companies for Regulators
Virtual reality technologies are going to have increased scrutiny from public policy creators in 2017, and there has already been a Senate Commerce hearing about Augmented Reality in November of 2016.
Some of the open questions that should be asked of virtual reality hardware and software developers are:
• What information is being tracked, recorded, and permanently stored from VR technologies?
• Is this information being stored with the legal protections of personally identifiable information?
• What is the potential for some of anonymized physical data to end up being personally identifiable using machine learning?
• Why haven’t Privacy Policies been updated to reflect what VR data is being tracked and stored? If nothing is being tracked, then are they willing to make explicit statements saying that certain information will not be tracked and stored?
• What controls will be made available for users to opt-out of being tracked?
• What will be the safeguards in place to prevent the use of eye tracking cameras to personally identify people with biometric retina or iris scans?
• Are any of our voice conversations are being recorded for social VR interactions?
• Can VR companies ensure that there any private contexts in virtual reality where we are not being tracked and recorded? Or is recording everything the default?
• What kind of safeguards can be imposed to limit the tying our virtual actions to our actual identity in order to preserve our Fourth Amendment rights?
• How are VR application developers going to be educated and held accountable for their responsibilities of the types of sensitive personally identifiable information that could be recorded and stored within their experiences?
Conclusion
The technological trend over the last ten to twenty years has been that our behaviors with technology have been weakening our Fourth Amendment protections of a reasonable expectation of privacy. As we start to provide more and more intimate data that VR and AR companies are recording and storing, are we yielding more of our rights to a reasonable expectation of privacy? If we completely erode our right to privacy it will have serious implications on our First Amendment rights to free speech.
As virtual reality consumers, we should be demanding that VR companies do not record and store this information, in order to protect us from overreaching governments or hostile state actors who could capture this information and use it against us.
In order to have freedom of expression in an authentic way we need to have a container of privacy. Otherwise, we’ll be moving towards the dystopian futures envisioned by Black Mirror, where our digital footprint bleeds over into our real life that constrains all of our social and economic interactions.
Is VR going to be the most powerful surveillance technology ever created or the last bastion of privacy? It’s up to us to decide. We need to make these privacy challenges to VR companies now before they become ingrained in our expectations.
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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
