Pico Launches Neo 3 Pro & Neo 3 Pro Eye, Serving up Strong Competition to Oculus & HTC

Outside of China they would have to compete with Facebook which are willing to sell the Quest almost at build cost and probably got favorable conditions for buying the XR2 in large quantities. Pico announced in March that they got another round of financing of about USD 37M, which is chump change for Facebook. They simply cannot compete in terms of development, marketing, support, paying for exclusives etc.

And due to politics of the last few years there now exists a strong anti-China bias in the US, even for companies that go out of their way to proof that they are not siphoning data or leaking details to the government. So Pico couldn’t even build on the “not Facebook” bonus, because it would be countered by “but China” claims. See posts in this thread for multiple examples.

Just as it is never safe to trust an American company, which can also be forced to provide the government with data. Which is why both the “International Safe Harbor Privacy Principles” and the “EU-US Privacy Shield” agreement between the US government and the European commission were declared invalid by the European Court of Justice, as they fail to protect the personal information of European citizens.

I’m not trying to equate the US and Chinese government regarding their trustworthiness, but I’d probably trust Pico more than Facebook, for the simple reason that Facebook has been caught red handed multiple times misusing data and lying about the impact, and their whole business model is based on it. They pulled all their VR devices from the German market to avoid getting in trouble when enforcing Facebook logins in their EULA, as they knew that the German data protection officers, well known for being very strict, would rip them a new one. That doesn’t bode well regarding their efforts to actually conform to (European) data protection laws.

No. Apple refused to introduce special back doors that would enable them to retrieve encrypted information from a phone that they themselves cannot access. They have actually cooperated with the FBI by providing data that was stored in an unencrypted form on the Apple Cloud several times, as this doesn’t introduce a new security risk for other users, while a back door would.

And the US government can force US companies to give them data stored on any of their servers, no matter where in the world these servers are located. Which was one of the main problems, as EU law usually prohibits US companies from giving out data if the data itself is stored on servers in the EU. The US government wasn’t willing to ensure that they wouldn’t force companies to provide them with private data of European citizens from European servers, which is why the European Court of Justice declared all the agreements as insufficient and therefore invalid.

The US government can also prohibit US companies from admitting that they had to provide them with data, so basically companies are forced to lie about it on demand. Some companies try to work around this by giving a summarized number of how many government data request they received in the last years, as this is the max level they are allowed to report on, but never which data was request or for which users.

This is not exactly unique, many countries have laws that give the government a lot of data access in the name of national security, which has become the catch-all phrase to circumvent privacy data laws, and they usually force companies to be silent about it. Which is one of the reasons why companies like Apple, WhatsApp or Telegram switched to end-to-end encryption, i.e. they themselves cannot read the data anymore, because the only way to ensure that the government cannot force them to turn over the data if they actually don’t have it. And this option to not have access to customer data themselves is what Apple (successfully) fought about with the FBI for years.

There are actually a lot of legitimate reasons why we would want governments to access data without e.g. suspected drug cartels being notified about it. The difference is usually the level of abuse, as countries like China or Russia will pull a lot of data on political opponents with obviously made up claims of them endangering the social order or supporting terrorism, the other catch-all phrase to throw data privacy overboard. Western countries are less blatantly when ignoring these laws, but the US NSA basically invented large scale data mining of international data and had no problems to eavesdrop on allied governments, so any blind trust there is just being naive. Even within Europe e.g. the French secret service was caught at what was effectively providing industrial espionage services for the French high speed train industry.

This is not a game where there are good guys/girls and bad guys/girls. This is a game of bad guys/girls and worse guys/girls.