The future of privacy in the metaverse

Imagine this scenario. A passenger walks into an airport, and immediately he steps into the airport a camera scans his face and a computer can detect his passport information which it sends to the airport and airline personnel and, more importantly, the passenger can easily save time and just head pass a robotic security scanner without any human interference.

Imagine another scenario, a CEO wants to meet with her team, and she simply puts on a pair of glasses, types in what she wants and calls for a meeting — her teammates join her in the metaverse without going into a building. The world is evolving fast, and privacy might struggle to catch up with this super advancement. Or, to put it in another way, will these evolvements involve privacy?

Metaverse is described as a future version of the internet where people interact socially and professionally, and it’s predicted to be a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity for multiple industries. Apple, Microsoft, Facebook (now known as meta), IBM, just to name a few of these companies, are making strides in this space. But the question remains where will privacy fall within this new world?

In a Deloitte report, they break down some features that companies should focus on when entering this space. The first step, of course, is to focus on the business justification of what exactly the company is trying to achieve — in other words, organisations must be clear about their legitimate interests and how it fits the purpose of trying to serve customers or increase their overall revenues. Once this is identified, then the company can begin to consider various privacy implications especially the cons and begin to eliminate them before segueing into these spaces.

Second step is testing. The metaverse can elevate services and change how we communicate within companies and even as humans. However, because most of these spaces are digitally inclined there would be a lot of programming involved and as such, the onus would be on these new companies to test and test what exactly can go right and what can go wrong. From this, they can get more answers towards eliminating existing privacy gaps.

I opine that most companies would eliminate a lot of human intervention as they forge ahead into these spaces and that would be the undoing of many companies’ approaches towards their existence in the metaverse. Imagine reading a newspaper in the metaverse then an advert springs up while you are reading an interesting article and the reader indicates that he no longer wants to view the advert but the algorithm — because it has studied and found that this individual keeps feeding her with this unwanted information. How can the individual seek human intervention when the algorithm keeps making wrong conclusions? This area of subject access request especially with regards to human intervention would be an interesting area and if not managed properly could undermine any company’s foray into this metaverse.

The future of privacy in the metaverse will be complex and an interesting one. We already notice how children exist in this space through games like Roblox. What would be interesting to see is how companies begin to plan to navigate the privacy choppy waters embedded in this new internet space.

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