This week Meta launched the Meta Quest Pro, a new virtual reality headset priced at up to $1,500 (about 10,755 yuan), equipped with upgraded hardware and advanced features, and the camera pointed inward to track the user's eyes. Gizmodo found that Meta has updated its privacy policy to include a new entry called Eye Tracking Privacy Notice, a page that has several paragraphs devoted to what data is collected.
The company states that if you agree to share additional data, Meta will use eye tracking and other data points to help Meta personalize your experience and improve Meta Quest. The policy literally doesn't say directly that the data will be used for advertising, but personalizing your experience is typical privacy policy phraseology referring to personalized targeted advertising.
Not only that, but Nick Clegg, head of global affairs at Meta, bluntly said in an interview with the Financial Times that eye-tracking data can be used to understand whether people are attracted to ads.
Ray Walsh, a digital privacy researcher at ProPrivacy said, when you can see a person looking at an ad for a watch, glancing at it for ten seconds, smiling, and thinking if they can afford it, that provides a lot more information than ever.
Meta Corporation has developed a number of technologies for these purposes. The company filed a patent in January for a system that adjusts media content based on facial expressions and has been trying to exploit and manipulate people's emotions for more than a decade. In January, the company filed a patent for a mechanical eyeball. Currently, there are no ads in Meta's Horizon Worlds, and given that Meta's two-dimensional business model relies so heavily on ads, the intrusion of ads seems inevitable. Meta shut down Facebook's facial recognition feature last year and deleted about 1 billion facial data, but the company never committed to completely stopping using facial recognition data.
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