Meta Quest Pro will track your eyes to serve ads

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Meta revealed its new $1,500 Quest Pro virtual reality headset earlier this week. And with that comes a new update to the company’s privacy policy that suggests Meta will track your eyes when you use its product.

Spotted by Gizmodo, the new privacy policy update includes one addition called “Eye Tracking Privacy Notice.”

The Eye Tracking Privacy Notice does exactly what it sounds like it does. It explains how Meta will track users’ eyeballs to “help Meta personalize your experiences.”

By now, we all know that this means targeted advertising.

And Meta can gain more information by tracking a user’s eyes on the Quest Pro than it likely has been able to do from other tracking methods in the past decade.

“Clearly, you could do something similar [to existing ad targeting systems] in the metaverse — where you’re not selling eye-tracking data to advertisers, but in order to understand whether people engage with an advertisement or not, you need to be able to use data to know,” says Meta’s head of global affair Nick Clegg.

Picture this: you’re hanging around in Horizon Worlds, the first iteration of Meta’s metaverse. Someone’s avatar is wearing a cool pair of shoes, and you glance down to check them out.

Now, Meta knows that you might be interested in those shoes, either digitally or physically. So the next thing you see is an advertisement for those shoes inside the virtual world.

But that’s just the beginning of eye tracking.

Eyes carry tons of emotion. They can tell if someone feels happy, sad, or anxious. Consequently, Meta can use all of that emotional information to learn even more about a person.

That kind of information can give Meta unprecedented insight into its users’ minds. Surely nothing could go wrong with all of that information.

It’s not like Meta is known for exploiting its users’ privacy in the name of profit. Because that kind of power in those kinds of hands could mean trouble for all its users.

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