Facebook's long-anticipated virtual reality headset, the Oculus Rift, is finally available. It costs $600, requires a powerful computer to run, and is sold out for months due to demand.
Oculus VR / Facebook
You get much more than just a headset for your money; the Oculus Rift package also includes the game "Lucky's Tale", an Oculus Remote, an Xbox One gamepad, and the Oculus Sensor.
That last one is especially important, because it's causing big problems for Oculus VR and Facebook this week. According to the Oculus Rift privacy policy, the company is collecting an awful lot of data about its users. One component of the privacy policy that's especially standing out to new Rift owners says the company will collect "information about your physical movements and dimensions when you use a virtual reality headset."
To be clear, the Oculus Rift privacy policy statement is saying that the company will collect data about your body's movement while wearing the Rift headset. It's able to do this by using one crucial component of the Rift's system: its camera.
The Oculus Sensor is a camera that looks a bit like a futuristic microphone.
Oculus VR
The Sensor, seen here on the left, is how the computer knows you're looking left, or ducking, or whatever else you may need to do in whatever game you're playing.
You plug the Oculus Sensor into your computer (via USB) and it tracks your head movements - a critical function in delivering high-end, immersive VR. When your head moves, it knows, and what you see is reflected by that movement in real-time.
The camera tracks sensors hidden behind sheer cloth on the outside of the Rift headset, like so (care of iFixit):
There are other aspects of the privacy policy that are being questioned. One concerns location tracking, based both on home IP address and mobile login. Being able to track both enables location tracking through the stationary Oculus Rift headset and the mobile Gear VR (made by Samsung in partnership with Oculus VR).
This is the excerpt in question:
Location information, which can be derived from information such as your device's IP address. If you're using a mobile device, we may collect information about the device's precise location, which is derived from sources such as the device's GPS signal and information about nearby WiFi networks and cell towers.
The Rift's privacy policy is causing enough people to freak out that Senator Al Franken of Minnesota got involved on Wednesday. A letter addressed to Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe was posted to Franken's website on Wednesday, which lays out six questions for Iribe on behalf of Oculus VR.
His questions range from asking why Oculus needs location and movement data, to how secure that data is, and how the data will be monetized. An Oculus VR rep told Tech Insider, "We received the letter and are reviewing it", but offered no other comment regarding its contents.
It's not clear why Oculus needs data on movement.
Location data provides useful technical information about the scenario in which a problem occurred. Movement data is harder to logically justify.
Here's what Oculus VR's corporate communications told Tech Insider when we asked how the company uses the data captured from users:
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 device stability and addressing technical issues to quickly respond to problems and improve the overall experience.
In regard to sharing information, Facebook owns Oculus and helps run some Oculus services, such as elements of our infrastructure. That said, we're not sharing information with Facebook, but we may do that in the future. We don't have advertising yet and Facebook is not using Oculus data for advertising - these are things we may consider in the future.
Concerns over the Oculus Rift privacy policy first arose on Reddit.
"When you install Oculus Home and agree to the terms of service, you are agreeing to let Facebook use any and all information it can glean from your machine/Rift/microphone to better target ads/sell to third parties," Reddit user Woofington wrote. And that's before people started asking why Oculus needs movement date.
We asked Oculus why that information is collected and how it's used to serve customers, but we haven't heard back as of publishing.