So too with all technology. There will be great breakthroughs and advances that come with some serious potential headaches.
Imagine what privacy challenges will come from the metaverse described below.
Thanks to Rob Shavell for this guest blog post.
Behavioral Tracking in the Metaverse, What People Need to Know
Rob Shavell, Co-Founder & CEO of Abine / DeleteMe (The Online Privacy Company)
“Privacy and safety need to be built into the metaverse from day one,” Mark Zuckerburg told Facebook Connect attendees during his company's rebrand to ''Meta” last month. However, within the kind of metaverse imagined by Meta and other metaverse-focused companies such as Microsoft and Roblox, user data privachttps://disasterzone.buzzsprout.com/y does not mean an end to behavioral tracking.
The metaverse, as showcased recently in a series of promotional videos produced by Meta, is a shared experience where a seamless digital layer will exist on top of the real world. Through virtual headsets or other metaverse friendly devices, like smartglasses, metaverse users may someday work from home alongside digitized versions of their colleagues, go surfing with Zuckerberg, and attend virtual concerts, among other things. As Meta is keen to emphasize, who we are in the metaverse will also be an extension of our real-life personas. Within the metaverse (a space that no individual company will own), you will be represented by a realistic virtual avatar — capable of showing your real-time facial expressions and body language.
Surfing with tech CEOs or working alongside virtual colleagues may or may not seem like an attractive version of the future. Nevertheless, with today’s tech giants primed to invest billions in making this vision a reality, the blurring of digital and real experiences is inevitable. What companies like Meta are less eager to point out, however, is that as users interact with the metaverse, they will open up a new source of behavioral information for metaverse companies to monetize. In the metaverse, companies like Meta won't just track clicks but what users actually look at.
Meta’s “Project Nazare,” a futuristic concept for AR smartglasses, demonstrates this concept. By tracking what a user's eyeballs are doing in relation to their environment, Meta is showing us how it will someday figure out user intent based solely on what individuals gaze at. Research already proves that eye-tracking alone can determine highly sensitive information about a person, ranging from their gender and age to their state of mind. As a result, regardless of the loss metaverse companies may take when building metaverse experiences, they will gain immense benefits from harvesting eye-tracking information and other types of biometric data.
Already, the opaque algorithms which social media companies use to profile individual personas and predict people's desires are far more powerful than most users imagine. A recent investigation by The Wall Street Journal into TikTok’s tracking algorithm showed how the platform can infer an eerily accurate picture of a user’s personality, gender, and desires from almost no information about them. Worryingly, the paper showed that as the algorithm zooms into what keeps users on the platform, the content they are shown tends to become ever more focused and extreme. In one example, new politically engaged user profiles were soon shown conspiracy theory-related content.
The recent Facebook whistleblower allegations give us a window into how social media companies approach these behavioral tracking risks. According to former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen, “The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.” As the company formerly known as Facebook pioneers the metaverse, the likelihood that it will take a different approach to behavioral tracking is slim.
