Frances Haugen sparked outrage last year when she released thousands of documents that exposed Facebook's failure to act when confronted with its users' harmful behavior. Now, the former Facebook product manager says she's worried about how those values will translate into the so-called metaverse, which the company, rebranded as Meta, hopes to have a central role in building. "They've made very grandiose promises about how there's safety-by-design in the metaverse," Haugen told me in an interview. "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." Sure, the metaverse is heavily hyped and little understood . But whatever this hybrid offline-virtual reality world eventually looks like, it's going to rely on a whole lot of our personal data and a willingness to give some of the world's largest tech companies access to the most intimate parts of our daily lives. For the metaverse to really work, at least the 3D-goggles version that Mark Zuckerberg has been promoting , it will mean installing sensors and microphones — in homes, offices and maybe even public spaces — to replicate our every move and collect massive amounts of data to create digital twins of real-world environments. Right now, the "metaverse" that exists is a poor man's version of the real world. Think virtual reality headsets and 2D avatars better suited to the Sims video game than humankind 2.0 — many of them without legs. Tech companies are hoping that the trade-off will be more appealing, or even necessary, in a decade from now if virtual worlds really do become as ubiquitous as social media. The type of data collected could range from the number of times your eye focuses on a product via a virtual-reality headset to changes in your heart rate as you play a video game to calculations about what food you buy through an internet-connected fridge. If Zuckerberg's vision of the metaverse comes to pass, we'll be wearing gloves outfitted with sensors and allowing "full body tracking." You name it, it's likely going to be counted. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, worries the real-time collection of so much of our personal data could make existing government surveillance look like child's play. The group warns that there are likely to be few, if any checks, on what companies can do with all the information they collect. For what it's worth, Meta is aware that people are worried. Just before rebranding itself — and shifting its long-term focus to the metaverse — the social network-formerly known as Facebook announced $50 million in funding for outside groups to delve into the hard questions on privacy, security and responsible design. "We'll work with experts in government, industry and academia to think through issues and opportunities in the metaverse," Andrew Bosworth and Nick Clegg, two senior Meta executives, said in a September blog post. "We also need to involve the human rights and civil rights communities from the start to ensure these technologies are built in a way that's inclusive and empowering." Some serious outside groups are involved, though as they are on the Meta payroll, it's an open question about how critical their eventual findings will be. For now, Haugen isn't convinced. She cites the ongoing privacy concerns created by a company whose main goal is to create as detailed of a picture about its users as possible to serve the online advertising, as well as the type of business model that Meta — and, frankly, a lot of other companies hoping to score big with the metaverse — will pursue in this brave new world. "I'm super concerned about how many sensors are involved. When we do the metaverse, we have to put lots more microphones from Facebook; lots more other kinds of sensors into our homes," she said. "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." These regulatory discussions are in their infancy . Most policymakers are still struggling to grasp what this new reality will look like, let alone the necessary boundaries to keep people safe. We hear about lots of must-haves: robust (federal) privacy standards; limits on data collection and how that information is shared; and decisions about limits, if any, should be imposed on any particular company owning a lion's share of this fledgling industry. But those discussions are, for now, as vague as our picture of what the virtual world will look like. | 
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