Defining Privacy in Facebook’s Metaverse
Over the past few weeks I have found myself in a variety of conferences and discussions focused on the future of information, data, and technology. Within all of these conferences, Facebook has been brought up time and time again due to the recent announcement of the company’s expansion into building the Metaverse.
For those who don’t know, Metaverse is the name for the ecosystem of Facebook’s products and services which are moving from just social media platforms to the creation of social technologies like 3D glasses, augmented reality spaces, and other ways for us to connect, communicate, and collaborate online.
This move to Meta has also resulted in other tech companies announcing their own commitments to virtual reality (VR) and digital environments, something which many companies have been trying to make happen for years now. Like Regina George’s critique of Gretchen Wieners latest slang in “Mean Girls”, I have always viewed most VR technology as an attempt to make “Fetch” happen i.e. it’s just not going to happen. From the glasses to the games, the technology rarely catches on for long outside of people who are already invested in purchasing any new product that appears on the scene.
However, Metaverse offers something different in that it is not only being proposed as Facebook’s foray into virtual reality but also as an olive branch that has the potential to right the many wrongs that the company has been called out for over the years. As the latest in PR spin for the company, the discussion of Metaverse’s commitment to privacy and prioritizing the needs of users has left me with a lot of questions that I want to explore in this piece. Specifically, we need to unpack the complicated definition of privacy in the 21st century and what the lack of privacy online means for the relationship between technology companies and consumers.
Redefining Privacy in the 21st Century
Now I’m not going to lie, I have never viewed the internet as a space where there was any sense of privacy. Growing up in the era of America Online (AOL), I spent my tween years in a space called KOL, or Kids Online. Launched in 2003, KOL was a derivative of AOL especially designed as a safe space for youth to engage with each other under the watchful eye of older online moderators. As a product of AOL, KOL also provided multiple services to parents, such as time restrictions and reports on what sites your kid visited and who they talked to online.
Unlike social media platforms of today, in which community guidelines are generally ignored and sparingly enforced, if you broke any of the rules in a KOL chat or forum, one of the AOL online moderators would literally call your parents and tell on you. In this sense, from the time I was a child, my experience of the internet was that it was a highly surveilled space with little freedom of expression and even less privacy. Another hallmark of my youth was the understanding of the internet as a permanent space where anything you posted online had the potential to haunt you forever. In this sense, the internet was not only positioned as a public space with no reasonable expectation of privacy, but as a highly precarious archive that kept a record of everything you did or said online.
However, in more recent years, there has been a significant amount of pushback against surveillance technology and the permanence of online posts. As users become more aware of just how much power they have as the free labor of platforms which rely on user generated content, the need for more ownership and autonomy over online data has increased. Especially when it comes to more personally identifiable information, fears around hackers and cyberattacks has also meant that privacy online is also a reference to a need for safety and security in online transactions and the exchange of more sensitive data. In this sense, the definition of privacy in the 21st century has become synonymous with data sovereignty, ephemerality, cybersecurity, and freedom from surveillance and policing.
Analyzing the Metaverse Marketing Package
And it is this shift in the definition of privacy that Facebook has responded to with the press on Metaverse. In reading through the marketing materials on the Metaverse webpage, I was less interested in the discussion of products and much more interested in the section on actions. Specifically, the website has a page called “Protecting Privacy and Security” in which Facebook outlines what they plan to do about users’ privacy concerns. With Facebook in particular, the company has come under public scrutiny because of how users’ information is being shared with advertisers and other users, the permanence of user data on the platform, as well as concerns around cyberattacks and information leaks.
In response, Facebook states that Metaverse has multiple privacy tools which allow users to make their data more secure and also to have more agency in how their information is shared. The company has even created an entire blog, called “Privacy Matters” focused on these issues. And it is in looking through that blog that I was reminded of a well-known public relations strategy known as controlling the narrative. When a company or individual comes under critique, controlling the narrative means not allowing the negative press or responses to become the story but instead creating your own story in response to the negativity.
In reading and analyzing the marketing and press releases for Metaverse I could not help but think about the timing and the way that end-users are addressed throughout the website. In particular, the fact that we are less than a month from the last Facebook congressional hearings makes it apparent that this was Facebook’s way of controlling the narrative and propelling all of the press from the hearings into advertisements for all these new products and services.
The blogs and other materials also demonstrate that Facebook is not only controlling the narrative, but using it to define what privacy should mean for users. But they’re not doing this how you would expect. Which brings me to something that I have been thinking about since before the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which is the reality of any entity having access to not only our data, but inadvertently our beliefs about information and data.
More Than Another Dystopian Dreamscape
Although many writers have discussed the speculative possibilities of Metaverse, there is a lot more to Meta than the dystopian potentiality of virtual environments and social technology. Unlike most companies which have a general understanding of how a consumer feels about their product based on customer reviews, purchasing and transaction data, as well as other forms of feedback, social media companies not only know how we feel about the product but also how we feel about everything.
This knowledge of our thoughts also means that social media companies know exactly what to say in order to assuage any concerns that users may have about the company and its practices. Through the collection of feedback and data, Facebook is not only able to craft the perfect product but also the perfect products and PR strategies to give consumers what they say they want, while still giving the company what it needs. Similar to concerns about politicians and governments accessing vast amounts of user data which reflects every aspect of the political beliefs of a collective in order to win elections, Facebook’s response to user concerns about privacy ensures that the company always comes out on top, even in the face of critique and controversy.
Which is why I want to know, Is it even possible to critique a platform, if they already know what we are going to say? Even as we all write these pieces in response to Metaverse, social media platforms are spreading these critiques around for them to be compiled and fed back into the back-end databases of other information collected by the platform and its machine learning algorithms. Even as we criticize the platform, the platform is then using those critiques to benefit the company and its portfolio, not the public sphere of data privacy and policy.
Similar to the way(s) that many technology companies have begun to take over the conversation on topics such as data ethics/data for good and responsible machine learning/AI, we are now seeing them shape the discourse on privacy using our own words. However, making these changes in the context of development and design does little when it comes to the actual fight for data privacy in our daily lives.
Even as Facebook works with policy experts on privacy, there is a sense that this work allows the company to stay compliant with privacy law while also influencing its future. Therefore, my final question(s) are:
What does it mean for companies to take the lead behind public policy initiatives around data privacy instead of users?
And, how can we ever trust that Facebook, or any other social media company, is actually giving us what we need if they always know exactly what we want?
