The ethics of the metaverse

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We’re all in a rage about the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels such as Snow Crash and Ready Player One. But we have a host of issues to consider when it comes to an ethical way to build and run the metaverse — before we plunge into it too quickly.

That was the message from a panel moderated at our GamesBeat Summit: Into the Metaverse 2 event by Kate Edwards, the CEO of Geogrify and executive director of the Global Game Jam.

Kent Bye, who runs the Voices of VR Podcast, said on the panel that he is concerned about privacy and general ethical frameworks around XR (extended reality, which includes virtual reality, mixed reality, and augmented reality). What data is collected through these metaverse systems, and where does that data go and how is it used?

Another panelist was Micaela Mantegna, an affiliate at the Berkman Kline Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University (and founder of Women in Gaming Argentina). She also does research on AI ethics. And Jules Urbach, CEO of Otoy and a longtime visual technologist, rounded out the panel. “We can move into a situation where we have all this really intimate biometric and physiological data that is being radiated from our bodies, captured by this technology, and start to undermine what the Morningstar Group considers to be fundamental neural rights,” Bye said.

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If we don’t have mental privacy and biological privacy, some of the new technologies could essentially read our minds, model our identity, reach fine-grained and