Apple’s new Vision Pro is “a privacy mess waiting to happen,” according to Washington Post tech columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler.
Geoffrey A. Fowler for The Washington Post:
Imagine you’re in a waiting room, and someone sits next to you with four iPhones strapped to their forehead. You might swiftly relocate.
Yet that’s exactly what’s happening when someone straps on Apple’s new Vision Pro headset. Each of these goggles contains the rough equivalent to a head full of iPhones: 2 depth sensors, 6 microphones and 12 cameras. It uses them to continuously track people and rooms in three dimensions — every hand gesture, eyeball flick and couch cushion… [T]his device collects more data than any other personal device I’ve ever seen.
At launch, Apple has taken steps to restrict some of the data collected by the Vision Pro, including what people’s eyes are looking at. That’s a very good thing. But there are also new kinds of risks Apple doesn’t appear to have addressed, or might not be able to given how the tech works.
I see a privacy mess waiting to happen. Among the new dilemmas flagged to me by privacy researchers: Who gets to access the maps these devices build of our homes and data about how we move our bodies? A Vision Pro could reveal much more than you realize… you’ve got a 75-inch television, suggesting you might have more money to spend than someone with a 42-inch set. Since the device can understand objects, it could also detect if you’ve got a crib or a wheelchair or even drug paraphernalia, he says.
Advertisers and data brokers who build profiles of consumers would salivate at the chance to get this data. Governments, too.
To combat people being surreptitiously filmed with the Vision Pro, there’s an indicator on the device’s front screen when it’s shooting a photo or video. Apple also isn’t allowing third-party Vision Pro apps to access the camera to capture photos and videos. That would, in theory, also prevent third-party apps from doing creepy things like running facial recognition algorithms on people while you’re looking at them.
MacDailyNews Take: Of course Apple’s new Vision Pro is a privacy mess waiting to happen. As is every new technology. Thankfully, Vision Pro is from Apple, so privacy will be a concern and the company will, as they’ve done repeatedly with every other product, work to evolve privacy protections as issues become evident.
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The Washington Post is a propaganda news outlet owned by Apple competitor Jeff Bezos. He does weekly conference calls with the editorial staff instructing them what he wants to read.
While I agree 100% WashedPost is a “propaganda news outlet” particularly working for the Democrat Party 24/7 — it is a major stretch to accuse/insinuate Bezos of directing newsroom managing editors to assign stories to writers for specific hit pieces about competitive tech companies.
Not only a conflict of interest and abandoning the tenets of journalism, may also be illegal if proven resulting in lawsuits.
Yes, journalism ethics and the industry at large has critically strayed from their mission statement in the last decade, to the lowest level EVER, if you read the polls of their steadied credibility DEMISE.
I’m the last person to defend this newspaper, but the article is quite good raising valuable warning signs, so I don’t believe you have a credible argument beyond guilt by association fantasies…
You’re still on my “liked Trumper” list.
This is incredibly dumb for s number of reasons.
So this guy thinks people are going to be running around in public wearing these things? Besides being ridiculed they would probably get mugged and robbed in no time with our current lawless society.
Could be fun to watch Darwin in action, yet again…
It’s going to be one’s “private mess” for awhile. Few are going to want to look like an alien in public.
This would have to be the most stupid article ever. This guy obviously knows nothing about Apple and how they develop their products. As others have pointed out Apple distinguishes itself by focusing on privacy. It’s a major selling point of their marketing and product development. I agree, this looks like a hit job by Bezos.
From the article. “ Most of my Vision Pro concerns are, at this point, speculative.”
Wapo- is a strag and I look forward to sting on its grave and that all its commie leftist employees are living under bridges in their own excrement like they deserve.
Like all the idiots that nitpicked the original iPhone, equivocating and missing the revolution it brought.
I really laughed when the reviewer compared this to the Google camera glasses that people worried might be used to ‘covertly record them’. I hardly think that people will miss the person wearing a space helmet beside them. And I take my ski goggles off when I go into bathrooms LOL.
Yes it is another Apple hit piece from the WaPo. Easy click bait. Apple needs to do more on privacy but it is the most vocal of the large tech companies on user privacy. There was no comment in the article on data acquisition and analysis being done only on the device itself (aka Apple model), vs in the cloud (aka Google model). Big difference.
Sure there will be privacy concerns anytime you ‘connect’ yourself but Vision Pro from Apple will be a magnitude less risk than being logged into Facebook, Google and TikTok while reading the Post.
Apple is the most privacy centric of all the major tech companies out there. That’s fact. Anyone who claims otherwise does not know what is really going on. Does that mean Apple is perfect? Absolutely not. It does mean that if a company is going to do a Vision Pro kind of product, we all want it to be Apple and not Alphabet or Meta or Microsoft or other similar company.
There will be ways of exploiting data from the Vision Pro that will need to be closed off as this product moves forward and evolves. That’s just reality. People do need to point out those holes in the privacy fence. Hopefully Apple will close off those holes very rapidly.
There will likely be lawsuits from companies claiming that Apple is not allowing them to do what they want to do, and refusing to allow their applications in Apple’s store because they violate Apple’s privacy policies. It will be a useless drain on Apple’s resources, but it will happen.
This is Exactly why Apple do it all on device not via cloud and why Apple is the only company with privacy at the for front of their devices