Meta Platforms Inc. built its industry-leading virtual reality headset by infringing Immersion Corp.’s patents, the smaller company alleged in a lawsuit.
The Meta Quest 2, which dominates the market, infringes six patents covering haptic technology, Immersion said in a complaint filed Thursday in federal court in Waco, Texas. In video game systems and controllers, haptics allows users to experience vibrations that mimic real-life forces — such as blocking a punch in a virtual boxing game.
Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has committed to spending $10 billion a year to bring to life his vision of a virtual reality-enabled metaverse. Sales of Meta Quest 2 hit 8.7 million units in 2021, twice as much as in the prior year, and the company owns 80% of the market.
Immersion is seeking a court order blocking Meta’s use of the infringing technology and unspecified damages.
Meta representatives didn’t immediately respond outside regular business hours to a request for comment.
Immersion, which specializes in haptics patents, is known for taking on some of the world’s largest companies in licensing disputes.
Meta (formerly Facebook) is updating its privacy policy and the company has begun notifying users of the same starting today. The company also says that it has rewritten its policy to make it easier to understand and to reflect the latest products Meta offers. “While the text looks different in many places, Meta is not collecting, using, or sharing your data in new ways based on this policy update and we still do not sell your information,” the company said in a press note.
“These Meta updates give us no new rights to people’s data. Our goal here is to be clearer and more transparent by adding more details and examples of our data practices,” it added.
While users are getting notifications about the upcoming changes, the new policy will go into effect from July 26, 2022.
Clear Redesign: Meta claims it has redesigned and rewritten its Privacy Policy to make it both easier to understand and easier for people to access the controls it offers to manage their privacy. The company also claims that the new policy is based on feedback received from privacy experts, policymakers, and users.
Updated Controls: The company has also added more detail about how it uses and shares information with third parties. Users too now have more control than before over who sees their posts and what topics they want to see ads about.
When someone now selects a default audience, the selection will apply to all new posts created on Facebook, until the user selects a different audience on a future post. This way, users don’t have to manually select an audience for all posts in a time frame.
Central Location: Meta has also made the new privacy policy available in one spot where users can access it with ease. The new policy is available at [www.facebook.com/privacy/center].
“You can think of Privacy Center as a hub for your privacy questions, where you can learn about how we use data, make use of some of the various privacy controls that we offer, and brush up on ket account security tips and tools. We’ll also continue adding more guides and controls to it,” Meta said.
Why is this happening?
Meta has made it clear that the purpose of the privacy policy change is to help users understand how the company collects uses and shares its data and have an understanding of how things work.
The company also mentions that the change gives them access to no new rights and users who receive the notification need not do anything about it. Those who, however, want more information, can click through the notification to know more.
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