More and more VR-based projects are coming to market. All of these ideas serve very different purposes, but that is also what makes the ecosystem so robust these days. The EFF has released a VR tool to help people spot surveillance devices near their location. This is an active counter to the deployment of spying tools by law enforcement agencies.
EFF Builds a Useful VR Tool
It does not happen all that often known organizations offer a virtual reality too out the masses. Especially not if that tool is capable of helping consumers identify surveillance devices in their neighborhood. Contrary to what people may think, law enforcement agencies have deployed an alarming number of spying tools. As such, spotting them becomes all the more important in this day and age.
This new application by the Electronic Frontier Foundation teaches people how to spot and understand surveillance technologies. This is done through an immersive and interactive virtual reality application which is known as Spot the Surveillance. It can be accessed through standard browsers as well as a VR headset.
EFF Senior Investigative Researcher Dave Maass adds:
“We are living in an age of surveillance, where hard-to-spot cameras capture our faces and our license plates, drones in the sky videotape our streets, and police carry mobile biometric devices to scan people’s fingerprints. We made our ‘Spot the Surveillance’ VR tool to help people recognize these spying technologies around them and understand what their capabilities are.”
In this VR experience, users are put in a 360-degree scene in San Francisco. Users need to identify surveillance tools by actively looking around the scene. On average, this process should take roughly 10 minutes,. It spans a wide number of surveillance devices, including automated license plate readers, biometric devices, and body-worn cameras. A very useful exercise, all things considered.
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