Study outlines privacy risks in metaverse virtual worlds
theregister.com
theregister.com
There's no study needed to prove that if you give more biometric data to an adtech company, it will be used to profile you and microtarget you with ads even better. XR headsets will market eye tracking as a way to improve immersion, while advertisers are salivating to get access to that data.
Wait until brain implants like Elon hyped a couple of years ago become the norm. You'll get ads straight into your eyeballs based on how you actually feel, and not just on your external sensory outputs.
Yay, future!
But you do need studies if you are a corporation, in order to guide the issues towards those that don't really matter, so that you can then plausibly say that 'privacy is not an issue' cos of all your actions.
Of course, those studies will themselves be a corporate affair, no doubt involving corporate ethics committees to ensure the bar is low, and perhaps they will even create some sort of national board or even legislation to enshrine and the further loss of privacy.
The whole charade is just an elaborate public relations exercise, with nothing to do with helping the individual, and everything to do with getting the individual to accept the unacceptable.
How much sugar coating do you need for a poison pill?
Very scary.
In my opinion these applications really need external sandboxing with security/access policies. Maybe something like firejail or bubblewrap but that works on Windows and Mac. If Valve would implement this around all Steam games I think that would be a great start.
Somewhat off-topic from this is the ability to monitor a players eyes and record their iris from the VR headset and limiting who has access to this data. I do see this being discussed anywhere. Some government facilities use the iris as one factor of ID. I do not know if this can be abused but either way I would not want random people having a copy of my iris and more than I would want them to have my DNA.