Virtual reality telemetry means you can virtually kiss goodbye to privacy Virtual reality presently looks like it will offer virtually no privacy for those looking to hide online. That forecast comes not just from knowing that the leading cash-burner in the race to establish a metaverse, Meta. It follows from academic studies enumerating the more than two dozen private data attributes available for …
> There is a real world out there, and we are allowed to go out in it.
There is a real world out there, you're right, but most of us live in a human-built environment. This human built environment contains elements that are planned and designed. VR is a powerful tool in this planning and design process. It can be an aid to community consultation about a proposed project.
There is a real world out there, and we are allowed to have a better-informed say in how it looks and functions.
until it becomes virtually (sorry) impossible to carry on with your daily life without one. I still can without my mobile, but it's becoming in-convenient (stop resisting the force, luke). When banking, shopping, health, education and social services move to vr in order to 'further improve our service delivery through a robust, privacy-respectful vr platform cured by our carefully selected business partners' - no one can hear your scream in real-reality.
If you want privacy, you restrict your interactions to people you trust, in an environment or medium that is not subject to snooping. If that is your need, then operating in a space that you don't control, which is occupied by millions of strangers, isn't what you want.
The real issue is anonymity. I can see how the techniques described can unmask someone who is attempting to operate under more than one alias, and maybe that's good, as a defence against deception or manipulation. But even then, the techniques can't reveal who someone truly is, so anonymity is preserved.
I'm sure that if tried to run a second ElReg user account, it would be possible to analyse my posts (meagre though they are) and work out that the same person is behind them. And if so, what is lost? Privacy isn't even an issue, and my true identity (A.B residing at C) is preserved.
tldr: I fail to see the problem.
That's true, which is why it is important to access these areas using made up credentials at least. But even so, it only takes sniffing of IP addresses to pretty much reveal who is behind a virtual identity.
It would be much more significant if someone came up with a way to reveal your real identity simply by analysing what you do in such a space, as opposed to information that you carelessly reveal about yourself.
Again, true, provided that you are somehow able to replicate your movement style in VR. Short of being wired to a multitude of sensors or being continually laser-scanned, while walking on a 360 degree treadmill, I'm not sure how VR movement could come anywhere matching real-life movement.
Ah - unless phone sensors are so good that they can do all of that in one neat package and feed into the VR...
There's already gait analysis. The real question in my mind though is WHY does a VR headset need to send back such an enormous amount of telemetry on even the slightest movement or interaction? But then I stop and think about who it is collecting the data and realise they don't care. They just collect EVERYTHING and then find a use for it afterwards, however creepy that may be. Linking VR identity data to a specific person is probably the easiest part of it considering what's already been collected on you even before you first attach a VR headset.
In this case, the idea is for users of Beat Saber to compare their gameplay.
Speedrunners and others have done this for decades.
As long as it's only intentional, explicit sharing requiring the user to actively set it up, then that's fine.
Some people do want to publish this data, like some people want to stream on Twitch et al.
Most people don't.
If you want privacy, you restrict your interactions to people you trust, in an environment or medium that is not subject to snooping.
This is tantamount to telling the people who escaped the Soviet Union (Communist China, North Korea, the DDR, fill in the blanks) hoping to put the reality you describe behind them that the Socialist Paradise(TM) was indeed more advanced than the decadent West, by some 40 years or so. I understand that it may not seem like a big deal to you, but some of those who unlearnt "restricting interactions" might beg to differ.
AC, even though this post may still be traced to my ElReg account. Just to make a point.
I'm a little bit surprised at the leap you took there. My words were merely what I thought was a reasonable expression of the meaning of privacy. Relating that to the life of someone under the Soviet Union / East German thumb is pushing it a bit.
My point was that a VR space by virtue of the fact that it is managed by someone not under your control, and which relies heavily on monitoring you, is hardly the place you'd go for privacy.
And on that score, if you like, I'd say that from the privacy perspective, entering such a space is tantamount to willingly emigrating to an equivalent of the USSR/DDR.
You could try actually reading the article:
"There have been papers as early as the 1970s which showed that individuals can identify the motion of their friends," said Nair. "A 2000 paper from Berkeley even showed that with motion capture data, you can recreate a model of a person's entire skeleton."
The way that research works is that it builds on top of existing research. If you read the article, you'll see that the author of the paper has outlined what his team have done that hasn't been done before.
A significant difference between CCTV (camera) sourced gait (motion) analysis and data slurped from a VR environment is that with VR the data is in a 3D space already. For a single camera view, the data source is a 2D surface, the projection plane in a 3D engine. Simple trig can be used to reverse that 2D projection plane into a 3D space. Multiple cameras focussed on the subject increase accuracy, but either way accuracy is decreased (to some extent). A VR environment gives "perfect" data.
It seems like it's always the same story.
1: Research group comes up with a way to make technology even more intrusive, and further monetize merely existing.
2: Privacy concerns are raised.
3: Research group points out that they're not the only ones creating privacy-invading techniques so stop picking on them, and also they hope the technology will be used responsibly and/or obfuscation to their original research results is developed to preserve privacy.
Boat. Leak. Duct tape. Again and again and again.
"Boat. Leak. Duct tape. Again and again and again."
End up with a vessel made of duct tape - a demented, unseaworthy variation on the ship of Theseus.
As the first comment points out there is an alternate reality to VR in which it does rain. This should be comforting because if its not "actual reality" its more likely to be someone else's delusion unless you like raining on your own parade.
As an abstract problem I would have thought you could treat each VR participants as a peer to peer end point and encrypting all traffic between them and with whatever models the "world" receiving only the grossest minimal data (encrypted) to coordinate tthe finer detailed model performed on the end points.
Not a problem I will face.
I think I have some clouds to shout at.
"Nair expressed skepticism at the possibility that privacy laws might be crafted to restrict the collection of all identifiable information."
I entirely agree. The key isssue is not the collection -- it's whether the subject has any control over what the information is used for. That's the essence of the GDPR (at least in intent). We unavoidably leave personal information behind us everywhere (from finger prints to card payments, phone calls and beyond) but we have a human right to control who makes use of it for what purposes (and particularly who monetises it).
I remember the days when privacy existed but I'm 70 so it's a little difficult to recollect events that happened many years ago - but privacy did exist back in the days when the computer operating system ran fine with 64kb of memory. Since then we have "upgraded" everything in the computing world ... what we see these days about privacy is well described in this article, so it seems that privacy has had a pretty typical "upgrade" these days.
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