Virtual reality – a site of renewed interest for major players in the tech industry – is increasingly one fraught with questions of data capture. This article examines the case of the Facebook owned virtual reality company Oculus and its intensifying privacy and surveillance risks with respect to the data generated and gathered through its devices. To explore the surveillance-centred structures of Oculus, this article examines Oculus’ privacy policies from December 2014 (the first version following the company's acquisition by Facebook), and October 2020 (the most recent iteration of the policy). In so doing, we examine these policies as sites of discourse, asking how they frame and afford power and control to Facebook, and position Facebook and Oculus’ surveillant aims and logics relative to societal concerns about, and regulations of, data.

虚拟现实——科技行业主要参与者重新关注的一个网站——越来越充满了数据捕获的问题。本文探讨了 Facebook 拥有的虚拟现实公司 Oculus 的案例及其在通过其设备生成和收集的数据方面日益加剧的隐私和监控风险。为了探索 Oculus 以监控为中心的结构，本文研究了 Oculus 2014 年 12 月（该公司被 Facebook 收购后的第一个版本）和 2020 年 10 月（该政策的最新版本）的隐私政策。在这样做的过程中，我们将这些政策作为讨论场所进行研究，询问它们如何为 Facebook 构建和提供权力和控制权，并将 Facebook 和 Oculus 的监视目标和逻辑与社会对数据的关注和监管相关联。