Key Takeaways:
- Haugen has turned her attention to the Metaverse after the company rebranded to Meta in order to pursue its virtual world dominance plans.
- In an interview with Politico on April 12, she stated that Meta has made “very grandiose promises” about the Metaverse’s safety by design.
Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, shook things up at the company last year when she revealed thousands of documents accusing the social media platform of spreading misinformation.
Haugen, who has invested in cryptocurrency, has now turned her attention to the Metaverse after the company rebranded to Meta in order to pursue its virtual world dominance plans.
In an interview with Politico on April 12, she stated that Meta has made “very grandiose promises” about the Metaverse’s safety by design. She added, “But if they don’t commit to transparency and access and other accountability measures, I can imagine just seeing a repeat of all the harms you currently see on Facebook.”
For the company’s Metaverse to truly function, intrusive hardware such as sensors, microphones, and cameras will be installed in homes and possibly public spaces to collect data for replication in the digital world.
If Zuckerberg’s Metaverse vision becomes a reality, the amount and variety of data available to the company will be mind-boggling. Haugen has expressed her concerns about privacy and user protection once more. She stated that the company’s main goal is to build the most detailed picture of its users in order to serve them targeted advertising.
She said that “You don’t really have a choice now on whether or not you want Facebook spying on you at home. We just have to trust the company to do the right thing.”
Companies like Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft have already launched “personal assistants” with the sole purpose of better understanding their users through data mining, all for the benefit of the company’s bottom line. The Metaverse takes this a step further by immersing users in the virtual realm using hardware such as VR headsets and gloves.
