> They care about it only insofar as it gets you to use a Facebook account.
Right. Facebook acquired a niche gaming platform that posed absolutely no threat to any Facebook business not because it was cool and extremely risky and why not. They acquired it to grow user counts in (checks notes) the one app that has already possibly acquired every user it ever will in the entire world.
I don't know dude. There are kids who use YouTube for years on the same device, easily and uncontrovertibly trackable without an account, who are bombarded with more advertising in a day than most high-tech-proficiency adults using Oculus, like me, using adblockers, see in a year. YouTube targets ads to users without accounts! Everyone tracks everyone without accounts, every day, every website you visit, all the time! And of course that includes demographic factors, as though watching kids YouTube material doesn't give away that a kid is watching. You don't need an account to tell you the user's demographics. Their friends and likes. You don't need those things.
And then what? So what if game developers learn the demographics and friends of their users. People have been measuring stuff about who goes to movie theaters, who checks out books, who listens to radio, for decades. What's the worst they're going to do, make more video games that find diverse, niche audiences they did not otherwise serve? Oh the humanity.
And then what the hell is some conventional brand going to learn from someone's Oculus play history? It's completely moronic, there's absolutely no economic value there.
Next you're going to tell me, oh it's horrible they created a VR Chat clone. Nobody is going to force Oculus users to use their shitty VR Chat clone (Horizon). What then are they going to learn from people? There is nothing to learn from VR Chat.
The user account story is just so absurd, it's so off the mark. Account or not they will be able to easily create quality, targeted advertising.
Matchmaking based on FB friends lists is a horrible idea, at least for competitive games. I don't want to play games with my young nephews, and I don't want to play random games with someone who is more or less experienced then me.
If you want to play games with friends, there are simple features exactly for that, and game-specific friends lists. Using the FB social graph for this is counter-productive.
Same goes for fitness tracking. Inside actual fitness games but in other VR titles as well. Again, this generates a ton of very personal data that, combined with other databases, unlocks a ton of value for advertisers.
This is why FB is so adamant about using FB profiles, even banning users if they make a guest account: For all this data to be really valuable, you need to be able to have it down to an individual resolution (that is: You know all the data is generated by a single individual, so you can combine it).
All of this, combined with existing data-generation, is a whole new level of invasion of privacy.
I don't think making better targeted ads is the play here. I think they want to dominate social networking, and they think a lot of social networking will take place in VR in the future.
The content inside a room would be. But it would costa shittonne in GPU time to do that reliably, so it would cost a boatload.
This is relocalisation. Two things to note here
1) Facebook don't have enough GPUs to do this properly at scale.
2) For that kind of thing to work it needs either a GPS prior, or much more robust SLAM. the oculus isft doesn't have enough CPU/GPU to make robust multi-room maps (with big occlusions that is)
> This is why FB is so adamant about using FB profiles, even banning users if they make a guest account:
Its far more mundane than that. Its all about branding. The "brand" is all about "One facebook" or someshit so they want everyone to be interoperable. Thats why messenger and instgram are now able to communicate. I assume whatsapp will be added to that as well.
You're assumption is that facebook are a coherent force for evil. They really aren't that well organised. They are a collection of highly paid, naive tech people. Surrounded by some people with experience.
> Environmental, Dimensions and Movement Data: We collect information about your environment, physical movements and dimensions when you use an XR device.
> We use information we collect when you use Oculus Products for the purposes described in the Facebook Data Policy under "How do we use this information?", including to provide, personalise and improve the Facebook Products (including seamless integration between the Facebook Products); to provide measurement, analytics and other business services (including ads)
https://www.oculus.com/legal/privacy-policy/
It's right there in black and white, they measure the dimensions of the participant and the environment, link it to a Facebook account, and use it to target ads.
Do you know why those clauses are in the legal agreement? its because otherwise they can't make the slam cameras work. Which means you need light houses.
Also when you submit a bug, I'm pretty sure it uploads the state of the SLAM map, which would be impossible if they didn't have the legal cover.
Now thats not to say that if they had the tech they _would_ use those bits of information. However they don't because they really don't have the tech yet.
Firstly the features that the oculus extracts from the SLAM cameras really arn't great for room mapping. Well, the cameras are fine, the feature extractor isn't. it works short term, but not for long term, or dense reconstruction.
Secondly, streaming 4x slam cameras at 60hz isn't trivial in a lab, let alone on with a battery on wifi on a generic internet connection.
Thirdly, facebook dont have anywhere near enough GPUs do the required classification/mesh generation/segmentation etc.
Finally there isn't a RGB camera.
It's "easy" for a competent software engineer, yes, not a random person. But I assume that's most of the people on HN.
Their information collection is a legitimate concern precisely because they have both the incentives (profiling and advertisement) and legal basis to collect it.
Google Home is people's own decision within their own home.
You mean microphones.
Oh my me, please let this be true. That would mean anyone born from today forward will never sign up for Facebook. Eventually the billions currently using it will all just die off naturally, and the user base will shrink to zero because "possibly" nobody will ever use it again. beep beep beep beep beep. just my alarm clock waking me from a glorious dream.
I don't happen to agree with that assessment, but there are some good arguments for the idea that VR may not meaningfully grow from the size it is now.
Also tracking of individuals was NOT there for decades but for a population! Learn the difference. And still it was not all right at all if there was, there are laws made decades ago against unwarranted tracking and tracing! (so it is knowingly unwelcome, not being a nice things, especially for children, whatever loophole some make for themselves to do anyway!)
Also the complaint was not about others do more ad but that very few does real product development for the sake of good products instead of ad maximizing tricks and honeypots.
Get your thoughts in order please!....
What people also don't get is Match making is a big problem while making babies too. Our Facebook Parenting portal makes baby making simple by requiring a Facebook account.
But its been a hard sell and we need people like you to enlighten the herd.
Hating on Facebook has now become a conformist thought pattern. There's plenty of Facebook to hate if you look, but most people just blindly apply their dogmatic hate everywhere.
Is it so? Are you conveniently forgetting the privacy violations, data sharing with third parties and manipulation of public sentiment that FB was the agent for, not long ago?
You're saying hating on FB is justified. That's not my point at all, although I agree with you.
My point is that it's conformist, and aggressively conformist people will apply the hate blindly, like what's happening here.
How exactly, I'll leave that for the experts.
VR isn't their end goal, AR is. The big bet is that AR will replace mobile phones. Owning the platform means profit from device sales and 30% cut of all apps sold. Thats the end game.
> The reason they are getting people to create accounts, which is obvious to anyone who has actually used an Oculus, is that the multiplayer matchmaking story right now is horrible, and it absolutely definitely needs to be replaced with something logical with cohesive friends lists. It is the exact reason Facebook is a nice way to login to mobile multiplayer games.
Can you elaborate? What's the issue with multiplayer games?
I own a Rift and I play (mostly Echo Combat) online... I don't see what's wrong with the games or why a facebook link would make it any better.
Because they want to build an integrated services and hardware ecosystem just like Apple, Microsoft, and Google.
I saw one comment in a previous post who echoes my sentiment perfectly: Facebook has not only become a universal identity provider but is now providing universal authorization, which is a problem.
Tuning the omnipresent Algorithm by your actions in VR might not be a major driver, sure. But locking you into the FB ecosystem and by extension increasing your exposure to FB controlled "personalized" content sure could be. Of course it will also feed back into the Algorithm as well, because why not.
Nothing parent says suggest he's clueless. He just made a rather common sense observation that investing in a very niche hardware company has a very poor ROI if your goal is getting accounts. But by doing this he BETRAYED THE CAUSE, so you must call him clueless to put him in his place. Bah.
No. Wrong. This is clueless. If I spend a few hundred dollars to buy a headset and a game, Facebook has no legal or moral basis to take it away from me just because I won't use their other services.
It isn't a "privacy" issue. It's a theft issue. Being pro-theft is clueless.
FB shouldn't require an FB account for Oculus, and Oculus is not a major source of ad data for them. I replied up thread, but given the ubiquity of web and app tracking for FB, Oculus is almost certainly not incremental to their understanding of almost any user.
The point touched was very very narrow: Facebook very likely doesn't invest in Oculus for the sake of getting facebook accounts. I'd probably argue that it's not even for the sake of getting more info about the users, though I haven't yet. But I definitely didn't say anything like "they can kill your hardware device if you give up your account".
I did criticise tribalism, polarisation and automatically assuming that a discussion has exactly two sides. Hint hint.
2)Facebook is NOT close to capturing all users imaginable and this will help in their global strategy of acquisition in the future (as VR becomes ubiquitous)
3)Your biggest problem is that you can’t think of creative ways to use data. Game libraries and play spaces can give more information on user income levels, user activity on Oculus helps Facebook understand how much of their users time is spent in games typically outside of Facebooks purview (there’s no tracking cookies in Steam games), the hours of operation of the device can give information about a persons occupational status, etc.
They really, really are. They have 2.7bn MAU, and even the people who no longer use the service probably still have accounts. They almost certainly have an account on 80% of all the people in the developed countries in the world.
Like, most of their recent growth has come from the developing world, because they subsidise internet access to juice the user numbers for the Street. They're not doing it to make money today, it's all about making sure that they are ubiquitous.
> 3)Your biggest problem is that you can’t think of creative ways to use data. Game libraries and play spaces can give more information on user income levels, user activity on Oculus helps Facebook understand how much of their users time is spent in games typically outside of Facebooks purview (there’s no tracking cookies in Steam games), the hours of operation of the device can give information about a persons occupational status, etc.
You are wildly underestimating the data that FB get from web/app tracking. Consider, if you're a gamer you probably visit game websites for socialisation or advice. The only benefit of the account stuff (from an ads perspective) is being able to sell access to Oculus users to Oculus app makers.
Like, FB already get pings from pretty much every website and app in existence, so they already know where people spend their time, no need for Oculus for that.
I personally think that tying Oculus to FB is a terrible idea which will get them in loads of trouble from an anti-trust perspective, but they're almost certainly doing it to reduce costs, rather than to get gamers data (which they already have, btw).
Similarly, only a small percentage of Google/Facebook's effort go towards ads. Most of it goes toward building products, languages, tools, and more.
Not only to use a Facebook account, but to have access to even more intensive and intrusive monitoring and information harvesting from users. All sorts of biometric and behavioral activity that is integral to using VR will now all be available to Facebook to integrate into customer profiles. Then there is the possibility of behavioral influence through the use of AI. Just like Facebook can influence behavior and choices by tailoring news feeds and ads to users, they will be able to mold the user's VR experience with behavioral cues and advertisements (both subtle and integrated).
Think about the effort they go through in order to track all of your digital movements now, and how valuable that is to them, and then consider how much more fruitful their efforts would be if you literally wore a headset that allowed them to monitor and influence your every perception in real time.
Yeah, they care about tracking people so much that they supply JS code for non-technical users to put on their websites, and provide an ad platform which is vastly confusing to encourage this behaviour \s.
Out of all companies that could own such a world, Facebook is the one that I'm most worried about.
Not a big difference in my book, humans are what we are. But with their emphasis on real name public face-book as their core business I suspect it could be.
The other big example of this problem is the massive overgrowth of the FIRE sector, which has largely eaten the US economy whole while accomplishing nothing other than its own enrichment.
[0] For the purposes of this argument, 'actual stuff' does apply to intangible goods, like software, that expands the production possibilities curve.
I have worked in this industry on and off for almost a decade now, and in general, advertising is only used for users who will never pay. I mean, it makes sense right?
You can get $5 for one IAP, and if you are incredibly lucky $5 CPM which is 1000 impressions. In-app advertising is a tiny, tiny percentage of revenue for most mobile gaming companies.
That being said, everyone spends on it because the best way to find people who'll play mobile games is to target people who play mobile games.
Cross-promotion also exists in just about every other media format (books, TV, movies...).
The problem is of course not unique to software. Eg. it may be more lucrative for drug companies to research hair-loss or acne drugs than something like cholera.
This doesn't seem especially unreasonable; hair loss and acne, to the extent they are problems, are unsolved problems. Nobody disputes that cholera is a problem, but it is very much a solved problem.
I completely agree with you that this causes a misallocation of resources, but mental health is probably not the best example you could have chosen.
correct. Everything is a stepping stone towards AR. In their view VR is limited, where as AR is killer platform that will let them run their own platform, with users finally paying directly for services.
> Making hardware is hard and risky. Selling hardware is hard.
Facebook realised a long time ago that they are reliant on either apple or google's platform. this means two things: They are vulnerable to any policy change on those platforms AND they are not getting a cut of the profit from the hardware sales and apps store.
> that there is very little reason to invest in real/hard problems
Facebook are dumping _billions_ into developing AR. not millions, actual billions. Mapping, dense reconstruction, semantic scene understanding, actual fucking holograms. All of these are nowhere near solved, and facebook are gambling big that they can not only solve these, but fit them into a set of glasses that are practical.
> If you're lucky, a user buys 2-3 games per year, Oculus takes a royalty and earns $15-$30.
If its such a risk with such a tiny reward why do sony, microsoft & nintendo still bother making consoles?
> Which is probably about the ballpark amount they earn just from each Facebook user anyway.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...
The problem with all of this discourse is that it misses the fundamental argument thats at the heart of VR and later AR: privacy. It doesn't matter if facebook fails, the problems still exist.
AR is a fundamental threat to privacy regardless of who makes it. For AR to work you need always on hyper accurate location service.
They will also need always on cameras. They will have detection, segmentation and reconstruction systems that have to be capable of understanding the context of a street, shop, work and front room.
Even if we ignore the AI bit, the threat of an omni-recording head mounted camera is massive. (all password are recorded, every sound, every person you meed.)
finally 6dof centimetre accurate glocal positioning, with facial recognition, you basically have a system that can locate any face within 50m of a wearer of one of these glasses.
In conclusion: stop using facebook as a foil, and start to actually interrogate the technology.
I have a government ID with my address on it, and I give out my address online to 3rd parties all the time because I understand I have to give up that private information if I am to expect packages to arrive at my door.
Similarly, AR would be a significant piece of tech that can offer a user a lot of functionality. As much as I am also sad to see privacy take another hit, I dont see what the alternative is. We need to be able to consolidate the processing of all the information necessary to make AR functional.
Always on cameras on everyone would also make you very safe in the streets. Which is necessary if we continue moving the country in a direction where there are few legal means for you to protect yourself
American corporations are legally required to maximize shareholder return. The entire public company system in the US is a paperclip maximizer that is designed to vacuum up every bit of economic value available on the face of the earth and give it to shareholders.
With 80% of all US stock value owned by 10% of Americans[0], the emergent goal of the economy is to suck up every available cent and give it to people like Bezos and Zucker------.
For people like Bezos and Zucker------, that's a good thing. For the rest of us? Not so much.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/03/02/...
This is a myth.
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-co...
https://www.professorbainbridge.com/professorbainbridgecom/2...
“The court may hold forth on the primacy of shareholder interests, or may hold forth on the importance of socially responsible conduct, but ultimately it does not matter. Under either approach, directors who consider nonshareholder interests in making corporate decisions, like directors who do not, will be insulated from liability by the business judgment rule.[9]”
This thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393674 has a lot of quotes from primary sources and legal analysis, and reaches a similar conclusion: directors can largely do as they please.
Acting in shareholders interest is not strictly equal to optimizing shareholder returns.
However this does not need to be the case. If the owners/shareholders want they can demand the company to be responsible for the environment, to be socially responsible as well, or to do basic research instead of maximising short term profits. It just requires the majority of shareholders to want that, and right now this still isn't the case.
This is actually something I picked up from reading Milton Friedman's books, where a corporation exists to do the will of the owners/shareholders. Maybe I read it wrong but that's what I understood it as.
"If the legal obligation to maximize profit for shareholders existed we would have to develop a good definition of how is is to be measured."
Translation of this bad argument: "Everyone uses words differently, so laws are impossible."
We have almost a century of stockholder lawsuits, some successful, to show how ridiculous this argument is.
People will obviously get their physical needs met in the real world but much of the emotional stuff can move into their realms. If you get people hooked on this, who cares what happens in the real world if you can control their perception of things.
It isn't OK just because they don't care. It's criminal.
This is what I see as the biggest overlooked consequence of web advertising--it's become so lucrative, that there is very little reason to invest in real/hard problems. All of the profits (and thus jobs, investment) is in how to tune the ad algorithm.
Making hardware is hard and risky. Selling hardware is hard. Writing games is hard. If you're lucky, a user buys 2-3 games per year, Oculus takes a royalty and earns $15-$30.
Which is probably about the ballpark amount they earn just from each Facebook user anyway.