Well, right now facebook's biggest ability is to manipulate individuals' opinions by curating the information being presented in their echo chambers. They leverage people's friendships and known likes to present content in an amiable manner that an individual would be more open towards. It's an inbetween point from targeted advertising where advertising networks are supposed to present you with what you're looking to buy to an evolved form of advertisement where they target mental states in which you would be more likely to buy into beliefs or products.

So right now, with biometrics and the tracking data not really being resource rich just yet, the risk is pretty low. But as things like heart rate, pupil tracking, and even EEG becomes more prevalent their platform (and it will be a platform, in much the same way they became gatekeepers for the personal information apps had access to) will be able to discern patterns of physical behaviors . They'll see who you're attracted to, the things you're afraid of; what elicits responses. And then combining that with A/B testing they'll be able to present information to you in a manner that you'll think it's your own idea to engage with. It could be something as simple as presenting thousands of banner ads in a game that have slightly different colors, actors/actresses/etc (think netflix's many title cards, totally A/B testing) or it could be numerous bots throughout a game wearing different t-shirts. There's tons of ways to do it, but once you know what stimuli elicit a response and the patterns of responses that get the behavior you're looking for, getting someone to feel what you want towards something becomes trivial.

Now, using current techniques they've likely already manipulated political sentiment to their advantage. Ignoring 2016, it wouldn't surprise me if they've elevated GOTV campaigns towards people who would be more likely to vote for neoliberal gig type bullshit like california's prop 22 or something. But imagine, in the future, if someone like Elon Musk had the ability to buy a campaign that found the exact versions of himself that thousands of individuals were more likely to fawn over. No more hit and misses at being a quirky meme king, instead he could just buy admiration by tapping directly into a database of people's biometrics and allowing them to be presented with avatars that showed him as being their fantasy of perfection. And it doesn't have to be for a person, it could be for a product or even an idea , like the aforementioned political stuff. And yeah, it would take a lot of collected data to get to that point, but we're talking about a technology that people are going to be immersing themselves in for hours and hours a day for the rest of their life.

The basic biometrics in cheap headsets, en masse, probably not in the next five years. And it's tempting to be like yeah, no ethical consumption under capitalism. But buying into facebook headsets makes them popular in the VR space ensuring they'll be around to do the really bad shit. I don't know if it's avoidable or not at this point, but I still discourage people away from facebook VR for being a closed garden.

That went a bit longer than I planned and it's late. Hopefully it's coherent.

The easy way to end run this is to get a vive/index.