In a recent interview, the former Facebook product manager, Frances Haugen, said that she believes that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for his company’s Metaverse is to increase the company’s already significant surveillance of users.
“I’m super concerned about how many sensors are involved,” Haugen told Politico. “When we do the metaverse, we have to put lots more microphones from Facebook; lots more other kinds of sensors into our homes.”
Metaverse will involve not just virtual reality headsets but also full-body sensors that track everything from one’s heart rate to eye movements. Currently, the graphics of the virtual world need a lot of work, but the potential is skyrocketing. Therefore, investments are flooding in.
As we’ve seen with social media and the internet at large, regulation often lags innovation, leaving little doubt that Meta and the other companies pumping money into metaverse tech will bring accusations of poor ethics in new domains.
“You don’t really have a choice now on whether or not you want Facebook spying on you at home,” Haugen said of the metaverse. “We just have to trust the company to do the right thing.”
This is something to take notice of and be fully aware of as it paints quite a gloomy picture of the future.