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January 7 - January 7, 2022
The take-home message here is that people’s behaviors in virtual reality are tracked, and therefore can be stored, analyzed, and used—for good, bad, or whatever the person collecting the information wants. In virtual reality, interested parties are able to track and store every micro-movement, gesture, eye gaze, speech, etc., in much the way that the content of e-mail and instant messages can be recorded.
This becomes scarier from a privacy perspective, the more prevasive it becomes
In so many facets of social behavior, ranging from financial decisions and the way blood flows through the body, to the manner people stand in a room, people use the same template they use in grounded reality and apply it to agents and avatars in virtual reality.
The anonymity of MUDs gives people the chance to express multiple and often unexplored aspects of the self, to play with their identity and to try out new ones. MUDs make possible the creation of an identity so fluid and multiple that it strains the limits of the notion. Identity, after all, refers to the sameness between two qualities, in this case between a person and his or her persona. But in MUDs, one can be many.
To further explore the consequences of viewing one’s virtual doppelgänger, we ran a simple experiment using digitally manipulated photographs. We used imaging software to place participants’ heads on people depicted in billboards using fictitious brands, such as the example shown on the previous page. Sometime after the study, participants expressed a preference for the brand, even though they knew their faces had been placed in the advertisement. In other words, even though it was clearly a gimmick, using the digital self to promote a product is effective.
The notion of virtual immortality differs from the notion of preserving consciousness. The idea is that, with virtual “tracking data” collected over a long period of time, one can preserve much or even most of people’s idiosyncrasies, including a large set of behaviors, attitudes, actions, appearances, etc. One will not be able to “relive” life through an avatar, but nonetheless, a digital being that looks, talks, gestures, and behaves as they once did can occupy virtual space indefinitely. In this sense, there are two ways to think about “immortality.” One is extending the nature of one’s
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However, if immortality is the goal, then we’re currently out of luck biologically. On the other hand, ten minutes inside a typical virtual-reality setup allows digital-tracking equipment to capture literally millions of bytes of data about a person’s movements, appearance, and behavior. In less than two hours, if a system records behaviors at high resolution, the tracking data will overflow hard drives on most computers. Consider today’s typical young adult, who spends more than twenty hours per week online, year after year. The amount of data that can be archived about a single person is
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What happens if someone builds a virtual version of you? Can you ever actually break up with him? Sure, you can physically leave, but there will always be that virtual version of you that can cater to any whim of your ex. Throughout history, lovers have saved mementos of one another; now it is possible to save versions of one another.
Participants have to wear a sociometer. In virtual reality, however, every action can be tracked without such devices, establishing the gold standard for reality mining.
Great, another golden privacy buttclench statement
