Diamond Naga Siu* says Facebook has admitted to holding patents to track users’ eye movements, but denies it is developing the technology … for now.
Photo: Victor Freitas
Facebook holds at least two patents to track user eye movements, but denies that it’s currently developing the technology.
“Like many companies, we apply for a wide variety of patents to protect our intellectual property,” Facebook wrote in a 229-page response to a set of questions from the US Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.
“Right now we’re not building technology to identify people with eye-tracking cameras.”
“If we implement this technology in the future, we will absolutely do so with people’s privacy in mind, just as we do with movement information (which we anonymise in our systems).”
The social media giant filed the first patent, titled “Techniques for Emotion Detection and Content Delivery”, in February 2014 and the second one, called “Dynamic Eye Tracking Calibration”, in October 2017.
Facebook said this “eye-based identity” technology could lower “consumer friction” and add security when they use or log into Oculus, the virtual reality company they bought in 2014.
“We believe that it’s important to communicate with people about the information that we collect and how people can control it,” Facebook wrote in response to a question posed by Senate Committee Chairperson, John Thune of South Dakota in April (before the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations were enacted).
“Privacy is at the core of everything we do, and our approach to privacy starts with our commitment to transparency and control.”
The document’s queries are a compilation of unanswered questions posed to Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg during his testimony last month and titled “Facebook, Social Media Privacy and the Use and Abuse of Data”.
That hearing addressed how Zuckerberg’s social media corporation allowed Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm working for then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, to access 50 million users’ data for targeted advertisements.
* Diamond Naga Siu writes for Mashable. She tweets at @diamondnagasiu and her website is diamondnagasiu.com.
This article first appeared at mashable.com.
