The big thing This week, Facebook put out a blog post talking about how they were testing virtual reality advertising inside their headsets for the first time, and in this post they spent some time addressing some of their commitments to privacy in this brave new world, namely that they won’t use conversations picked up by the headset’s microphones or images picked up by its tracking cameras to target ads to users. They noted that they don’t currently have plans to use motion data captured by the headset, but didn’t make a hard commitment. Today, this all doesn’t mean that much to people. Facebook’s Oculus headsets are largely just toys used to play games and they don’t hold a candle to the utility unlocked by smartphones in our daily lives, but then again things weren’t so different a decade ago when smartphones came into their own. We may not all be wearing VR headsets in a decade, but Apple and Facebook and Microsoft and Snap are betting billions and pushing tens of thousands of employees onto the assumption that we’ll all be wearing augmented reality headsets around then. It’s a prospect that’s wildly exciting to technologists, concerning to privacy advocates and likely years away from relevance to elected officials who have largely showcased just how ill-prepared they are to regulate technology in the mobile age. Rather than ham-handedly unwinding the tenets of major mobile platforms from trillion-dollar companies, perhaps the more technologically minded regulators should be spending this time thinking long and hard about how they want a world to look where there’s no meaningful friction between digital and physical frameworks. It’s a very bizarre time for Big Tech populism; these major platforms are hated by both sides of the aisle for different reasons, but we’re probably going to see a couple efforts gather steam as politicians push to do something. AR regulation might not have the same appeal that a war on Big Tech’s bottom line today does, but it’s probably the most meaningful space in which they could be spending their time in terms of future competition for the world’s biggest companies and defining guidelines for consumer protections. Realistically, we’re probably a good 8-10 years from AR tech reaching mainstream appeal, but in the meantime all of these platforms are going to be building out operating principles and platform infrastructure, while being forced to grapple internally about their ethical red lines. This is certainly a lot to expect from companies like Facebook, which have a track record for erring on the side of their shareholders’ interests, but forward-thinking regulation is also a lot to expect from regulatory bodies made up of people who barely understand how today’s platforms function. But this is about as straightforward a time as will ever exist when it comes to issuing broad regulatory edicts without breaking businesses and platforms on which millions of people rely. Rather than define AR’s platform-unique GDPR-type regulation in 2030, wouldn’t it be dandy if those conversations happened now? | 
Post a Comment