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Are we ready for the metaverse? It seems we’re all eager to experience it, but we haven’t measured its depth and complexity.
The metaverse promises to change our perception of reality, but it’s not without security risks.Shocking safety stories don’t take long Violations in the virtual world spread.While it’s still in its early stages, early testers have been intimidated, sexually assaulted and subjected to racist tirade. In fact, if immersive gaming tells us anything, it’s the users of these spaces continuously risky.
back Years of experience Faced with the challenges of social media and gaming platforms, we now understand the complexities of the risks we may face in the virtual world. Therefore, this may be the right time to start planning for digital security. If we are to make the metaverse a safe and efficient tool for humanity, we need to understand the potential risks, design different scenarios to face them, and leave enough room for the unknown.
What is the Metaverse?
Metaverse is a 3D virtual reality world dedicated to being a true augmentation of human reality and the development of today’s internet. It’s basically the internet as we know it, but with the addition of a fully immersive experience that allows users to go from concerts to shopping malls, to buy clothes and even rent real estate.
Although it is an emerging technology, we have been experiencing the early stages of the metaverse for many years. It became a trend in 2010 when we saw the first Oculus Rift VR prototypes. Then in 2014, Facebook acquired Oculus, Samsung and Sony Announcing their VR launch, the rest is history. The Metaverse is the culmination of the virtual reality and augmented reality technology we’ve been immersed in over the past decade.
Today, it is fast becoming one of the major players in disruption, changing the paradigm of human interaction, how we experience life’s fundamental moments, and even academic and work opportunities. It’s also transforming the labor market and creating new income opportunities for the thousands who now provide services within the ecosystem — according to PWC, the metaverse could be worth $1.5 trillion by 2030.
As many have said, as with any new innovation, the metaverse presents great opportunities, but also great risks.
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Same challenge, different technology
In fact, the digital stakes are already high, and as we learn more about the metaverse, we know they will get even higher.
Metaverse promises to simulate the real world in a digital ecosystem, which means that every little interaction will be replicated. From a diagnostic standpoint, this will mean evaluating every interaction we know about today in an attempt to understand the potential risks of this new ecosystem. A good start to assessing upcoming threats is to learn from the social media challenges we face, which provide us with valuable lessons on data privacy, user authentication, policy violations, and free speech.
Some of the known risks include emotional risks, which are already present in social media and easily exacerbated in the virtual world. However, other unknown scenarios will require different security policies, systems and frameworks, such as inappropriate touch. The reality is that your avatar can be touched, bullied and harassed in the digital world. Imagine cyberbullying in a virtual world – where avatars can follow you and verbally harass you, virtual worlds feel more real and tangible than comments on social media pages.
Many possible breaches in the physical world will occur in the virtual world, with the anonymity of bad actors. This brings me to one of the most worrisome aspects of Metaverse: child safety.
As we were replicating all the scenarios in real life, the risks to this curious, excited, yet vulnerable population immediately came to my mind. One of the key goals of the ecosystem should be to design the right framework to ensure the trust and safety of all involved actors, including children, with a special focus on children. User authentication policies to avoid impersonation, basic principles to prevent child exploitation, proper safety gates to block inappropriate content for children, and even designing safe journeys for their fun should be a top priority for developers, policy makers, and trust and safety experts.
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steps we need to take
There are several steps we can begin to take now to protect this future world for ourselves and our children. However, this is not an easy problem to solve and requires a multi-sectoral effort. The industry will need to collaborate with government, academia, private institutions and civil society to meet the upcoming challenges of this emerging technology. While not everyone will agree on what to expect from standards of conduct or unacceptable interactions, there is a need for dialogue on these issues.
Companies are already working to create ways to enforce personal boundaries in the virtual world.we can already solve deep fake By using biometric authentication, blockchain and other authentication technologies.
An effective action is planning based on prohibited behaviors in the real world. This applies to community guidelines and formal laws. Updating these principles to match the new reality proposed by the Metaverse will allow for better adaptation and reduce potential harm to the most vulnerable audiences.
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A new but familiar question
The metaverse is new and developing so rapidly that we don’t yet have good answers to these complex security questions. Just as online threats continue to evolve, so will the threats we face in the virtual world. People are innovative — and sometimes most importantly, cybercriminals. In the face of these challenges, we must remain vigilant, apply previous lessons, and continually seek solutions as more of our lives expand into the metaverse. By asking the right questions, engaging in heated discussions, and challenging paradigms, we will be on the right path to keep people safe in the metaverse.
