Contact us anytime to know more — Kuldeep K., Founder & CEO CISIN
These incidents have not happened yet, and they may seem a little too sci-fi for the moment, but they are not unimaginable given the rate at which the virtual and augmented reality innovations are progressing.
According to advisory company Digi-Capital, the AR/VR market will hit $108 billion by 2021, up from $3.9 billion in 2016. And all that cash will not go into matches and entertainment. Both the AR and VR are finding their way into many different domains, including healthcare, sports, schooling and skilled work.
While these inroads are helping people create the best use of these cutting-edge technology in our everyday lives, they will likewise be exposing us to new safety hazards.
We do not know the precise extent and wide range of those dangers, but it is imperative to pause and reflect on the way the growth of AR and VR will influence our privacy and safety.
Different type of information means new privacy threats
When most programs were operating on desktop and laptop computers, the information collection capacities of businesses running online providers were confined to things like surfing habits and interactions with user interfaces.
With the introduction of cellular devices, those businesses found the capability to track users' places and moves and watch that the world through their smartphone cameras. Wearables allowed the selection of health information, smart speakers driven one to give away samples of their voice, and IoT apparatus brought together with the capability to feel the world in ways that were previously not possible.
AR and VR headsets collect information regarding your eye and head movements and all sort of responses you reveal to different visual content.
If they're armed with hand props and gesture detection technology, they will have the ability to capture even more data about your physical behaviour. This has been a domain name that had stayed closed to big tech companies. I am not surprised that most big tech companies have demonstrated interest in the technology.
Facebook produced the $2 billion acquisition of VR startup Oculus from 2014 and has introduced excellent plans to create VR social experiences. The added information will help them comprehend (and monetize) their users.
Among those privacy challenges which the AR/VR business will be facing is procuring the attention information they collect from their customers.
As with any other business that collects personal information they might need to be transparent about how they shop, manage and mine that data, how and if they share it with third parties and the way they protect it in their own servers. Users should also be careful of the services they register for and make certain their data stays safe in the hands of the companies that supply them with applications and services.
New methods to exploit users
Info per se is not a bad thing. Substantial data and AI could do wondrous items, such as fighting cancer, enhancing the quality and availability of education, and coping the scarcity of food throughout the world.
But in the wrong hands, they can also be used for wicked purposes. Already, the ways companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon are now mining and with their customers' information has become a real privacy concern.
These businesses are in a hurry to collect customer information, mine that data to make digital profiles of every one of their clients, and then employ those profiles in lucrative ways like displaying engaging content that will help users glued with their own applications, showing relevant ads or making enticing purchase tips.
The information supplied by AR and VR headsets will enhance their powers by providing them more precise details about how users interact with content.
Matters get creepy when these firms or other actors that use their programs participate in activities that steer users in intended directions by demonstrating them targeted articles.
We have already seen this play out in the past elections, where political ads were used to manipulate voters. Facebook's advertising platform is extremely effective as it enables advertisers to filter out their crowd based on data that is fine.
AR and VR will add even more parameters to these advertisements, including the sort of colours users are attracted into or the places on the display where they are most likely listen to.
AR and VR software are extremely immersive experiences, meaning there will be lots of opportunities to target users in a way that could be persuasive and convincing.
The security hazards of AR and VR
At this phase, we can only speculate on what the future security dangers of AR and VR will be, like the sci-fi situations we analyzed at the beginning of this article.
However, there are some things that we currently know.
Augmented reality will probably be all about overlaying graphics and data on the real world. Gamers, architects, shoppers and specialist workers will rely on the info supplied by AR software to create real world decisions.
If hackers endanger an application and get started displaying fake information and graphical items on a sufferer's AR screen or glasses, they could cause harm. For example, imagine a physician checking on patients' vital signs through an AR display, only to be presented with the incorrect numbers and failing to tend to a man who needs immediate attention.
AR can become a productive instrument for alerting users as part of a social engineering strategy. Imagine how fake signs in the roads or on top of stores can misguide consumers into making errors.
Another possible strike I see here is a refusal of service, in which users that rely upon AR screens for their occupation are abruptly cut off by the flow of information they are receiving.
Here is something which sometimes happens in each application domain. However, AR is particularly concerning because most professional employees will be using the technologies to perform jobs in critical scenarios, where not having access to information can have disastrous or fatal consequences.
This can be a surgeon suddenly losing access to crucial real time information onto her AR glasses or even a motorist abruptly losing sight of the street since his AR windshield turns into a black screen.
VR security dangers are a bit different, and possibly somewhat less critical than AR, because the use is restricted to closed environments and does not entail interactions with the actual physical world.
However, VR headsets cover the user's full vision, which is harmful if hackers take over the gadget. As an example, they can begin manipulating content in a way that will cause dizziness or nausea in the consumer.
Lack of security measures in designing, distributing and building IoT apparatus has produced a cybersecurity problem that has come to be very difficult to fix.
In their hurry to hit the store shelves and avoid being left behind by competitors, IoT device manufacturers sent countless apparatus with easy-to-exploit vulnerabilities. They never believed that those innocent devices will become the key perpetrators of global cybersecurity crises like the 2016 Dyn DDoS attack.
That is a lesson the AR/VR industry should take into the heart. We have to think about security incidents when producing goods, not once they happen.
