Unlike some of my tech colleagues, I don’t see Metaverse as a virtual world where we work, communicate and shop. Instead, I see it’s the time we’ve come to in 2020 and this year due to the global pandemic, where the digital world has become as important as the physical world. This is a departure from the idea that physical reality is better and better than digital reality.
For many, work has become a series of meetings on Zoom, people are buying virtual real estate, and kids spending time with their friends in Fortnite and Roblox. The renaming of Facebook to Meta suggests that there is no going back to what it was before, as a critical mass of people have recognized the benefits of working in digital reality.
And with this breakdown of reality comes the realization that the bits of privacy we once had may soon turn into a miserable nightmare where we can be arbitrarily excluded from the virtual environment in which we live, work and play.
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Corrosion of anonymity
As digital resources become more and more important to us, they become more and more closely related. While we’re not yet at the point where everything is combined into one account, we can see where things go based on what really happened, especially when it comes to using Facebook and Google accounts as a gateway to many different platforms.
Many of today’s digital privacy concerns, such as identity theft, identity theft and targeted advertising, can be traced back to the hack that made Facebook successful by giving people enough incentive to sign up under their real names. Before Facebook, most people used pseudonyms on the Internet and were uncomfortable sharing so much personal information openly. They were anonymous and appeared on various forums. With Facebook having people’s names linked, payment services including Apple Pay and Google Pay, and Amazon shopping profiles, most internet users suddenly have an online personality that shows how they interact in the digital world. Connecting all of these services already has serious privacy implications, leaving people’s data vulnerable to hacking or misuse.
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As we shift a large part of our lives to the digital world, the threats of data breaches and audits are becoming more and more severe. Borrowing a concept from the crypto world is like putting your entire life in a hot vault where it is always accessible and vulnerable to bad players, as opposed to a cold vault where only you control the keys to your stuff.
This transformation prepares us for a future in which whoever controls access to what becomes the metaverse’s main profile can enforce laws against the provider of that account. There may be situations, if a person does not comply with existing regulations or rules, he may find himself disorganized, which in this case interrupts the only crucial way in which we work and communicate. . This person will be a digital outcast.
When Mark Zuckerberg announced his company’s rebranding, people pointed out that when you die in Metaverse, you “die” in real life. This is a terrible idea. You are still alive, but you cannot access the people, places, resources, or tools that you previously had access to. Something like this wasn’t possible in material life before. Now this can happen quite easily, especially since there is not a lot of clarity about what our rights are and what is the legally fair process that is required in the digital realm.
erosion of rights
There is already a legal plan for this scenario. The Patriot Act passed after 9/11 effectively gave the government the discretion to do whatever it wanted without a fair trial. Under the Patriot Act, if the Federal Government, through the CIA, the FBI, or any of their law enforcement agencies, requests that Google, Facebook, or Apple monitor all user activity in the United States, the Company is not permitted by law. Even informing the person that he is under surveillance. For being on the user side in all respects, there are huge fines.
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We are now paying more and more attention to our digital lives without having a clear idea of our rights in this new world. We have already placed significant trust in organizations that have a documented record of misusing that trust and do not protect the information provided to them. We have purchased these systems and will in effect become digital servers where we are located when the supply is appropriate.
