Once again, an emerging technology is bringing us back to awareness about the omnipresent End User Licensing Agreement (EULA) in our computing society, those annoying endless pages of legal copy you are forced to click “agree” every time you update or install software.
EULAs were originally designed to protect the issuing company from liability in case of loss of customer data and to ensure the copyright of the code for the company.
Of late EULAs have become the legal world’s best friend for the unrestricted harvesting of the data around each and every one of us.
This process has come to the blinding light of day in the VR world. OculusRift© headset to consumers has more than 20 pages of EULA on its website.
For the few of us who actually read these documents, this one held some surprises. Oculus has clear wording about who has access to your work:
“By submitting User Content through the Services, you grant Oculus a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual (i.e. lasting forever), non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free and fully sublicensable (i.e. we can grant this right to others) right to use, copy, display, store, adapt, publicly perform and distribute such User Content in connection with the Services.”
What Oculus is basically saying is: They can use any or all of your content whenever they want to.
They also require that you have all legal docs available if they choose to use that content: “You either are the sole and exclusive rights owner of all User Content that you provide, or you have obtained all rights, licenses, permissions, consents and releases that are necessary to grant to Oculus the rights specified in this section.”
This is not new. Oculus is owned by Facebook, which has fastidiously denied previously used a similar wording on their site that granted unlimited access to use your private images in ads selling goods to your “friends” on Facebook and other sites.
While Facebook and its subsidiaries make it clear that each individual owns the content they create and publish, the line that follows states: “You grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post.”
The amount and types of data collected on your computer, and while using the Oculus Rift Headset, covers everything — from the other applications stored on your computer to how you physically interact with the device.
That’s along with any information you supply in the process, from location data to your credit card info.
Since the Rift headset is essentially powered up all the time, Facebook is probably already testing the ability to mine data about you 24/7. Facebook has proved it is able to monetize private data almost as well as Google.
The government will no longer have to steal our personal data. It will be able to buy it direct from Facebook {i.e. Oculus} or from hackers on the Dark Web.
