Vision Pro may pose significant privacy risks

[HDFan]

Reposting as a separate thread since it could be a significant issue.

Haven't seen any discussions about privacy concerns with the vision pro. Washington Post makes some interesting points:

"The new problem is what else the device is gathering: a map of the spaces around you. The device needs to know the contours of the world around you so it can know where to insert digital things into your line of sight."

"Understanding what’s in the room around you can be even more invasive than having a photograph of it ..."

"Information about how you’re moving and what you’re looking at can give significant insights not only to the person’s unique identification, but also their emotions, their characteristics, their behaviors and their desires in a way that we have not been able to before,”

Researchers last year

"discovered they could uniquely and consistently identify about 55,000 different VR users based solely on data about the movement of their head and hands. It’s as useful as a fingerprint, maybe more."

"used head and hand motion from a game to guess some 40 different personal attributes of people, ranging from age and gender to substance use and disability status."

Analysis | Apple’s new Vision Pro is a privacy mess waiting to happen

The Vision Pro, arriving Friday, brings us a whole new dimension of privacy risks. Apple appears to have only partial solutions.

www.washingtonpost.com

 

[dumastudetto]

This is Apple. They don't exploit privacy for financial gain. Apple protect our privacy against invasive and downright creepy apps with a multi-faceted approach to locking it all down.

 

[jclardy]

What a clickbait article - Apple's SDK's were specifically designed to not release any of this information. Developers can't see hands, can't see your room, and can't even know the layout of your room unless you are in immersive mode AND give them permission for each item individually, and even still - you get the layout/geometry of objects, not camera feeds, and you also get hand geometry, not images of your hands. And to do direct hand tracking, you have to give permission to the app to do so. For "normal" shared space apps, you get a "click"/"tap"/"drag" gesture, just the same as you do on iOS, not physical hand motion data.

This means apple is 100% on the privacy side right now, compared to Meta, which is basically the opposite. There are major tradeoffs to both sides - with Apple's setup you are much more limited in what you can build as a third party developer.

 

[bigjnyc]

I guess this was never an issue with any other VR headsets in the past huh..... Like with a headset made by a company who makes money collecting user data for example.... But I guess it only becomes an issue all of a sudden with an Apple headset because the name Apple will generate more clicks for the publication.

 

[AdonisSMU]

To me privacy is the thing that this device provides. I dont have to worry about peoples prying eyes and I can limit what apps guests can use.

 

[ckurt25]

I'm not sure how much different this would be than using the camera on your phone or other devices around the house. This isn't unique to the AVP.

 

[Tdude96]

It's definitely something I was concerned about and one of many reasons I've tried, but never bought any other VR devices, but am interested in AVP. Here's the link if someone wants to read the hit piece with greater privacy.

Apple's own developer resources outline what can and cannot be done and what requires user permission. They're very open about it.

Adopting best practices for privacy and user preferences | Apple Developer Documentation

Minimize your use of sensitive information and provide a clear statement of what information you do use and how you use it.

developer.apple.com

Sadly it seems like another fear mongering headline and media hit piece designed to manipulate opinion rather than genuinely inform. One can definitely get a sense of jealousy as well with a few statements about feeling miffed Apple didn't consider them important enough to provide with a demo AVP.

Adding to my concern is that Apple, which has staked its reputation on privacy, wouldn’t answer most of my questions about how the Vision Pro will tackle these problems. Nor has it, to date, allowed The Washington Post to independently test the hardware.

One of many things naysayers state for why AVP will "fail" is because of Apple's strong privacy protections, which they claim will prevent developers from wanting to make visionOS apps. Among others, entirely preventing apps from gathering a lot of direct information about a user or their environment for a lot of interactions and requiring explicit permission from the user for others. It's not like Apple's hiding their privacy-first position or failing to highlight when a developer wants more user data.