Invasive surveillance Are regulators ready to deal with Facebooks metaverse

As Australian lawmakers struggle to regulate social media amid an onslaught of misinformation, conspiracies and extremist content, they are already facing the dawn of big tech’s latest push to make an even more invasive technology a part of everyday life.

Silicon Valley’s growing obsession with the metaverse â€" a nebulous concept grounded in the idea that the next generation of the internet will enable the real physical world and virtual worlds to seamlessly converge â€" is underpinned by an unspoken promise of mass data harvesting and new frontiers of highly targeted advertising.

The metaverse can be difficult to understand because it largely doesn’t exist yet, and there is no formal consensus on how a fully-fledged version of it should operate. But it is broadly understood to involve the use of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies, such as headsets, to bring to life a broad range of experiences â€" from socialising with friends to shopping or work conference calls â€" using immersive 3D imagery like holograms.

The gaming industry has been making inroads into the metaverse for years. But last week, Mark Zuckerberg staked a multibillion-dollar claim over its future development, declaring the metaverse to be the future of the internet and announcing Facebook would be renamed Meta to reflect its revised ambition to bring it to life.

In Zuckerberg’s metaverse, technology like AR glasses will be ubiquitous in everyday life, allowing people to live in an “embodied internet” where teleporting into new virtual worlds at a whim will become normalised, while “avatars will become as common as profile pictures are today”.

Dr Marcus Carter, senior lecturer in digital cultures at the University of Sydney, says Zuckerberg’s vision is premised on what is essentially surveillance technology to drive highly targeted advertising. This throws up major questions about Facebook’s fitness to steer the development of the metaverse.

“When Zuckerberg is announcing these changes, he’s not saying ‘we’re doing this because we’re going to be able to deliver more accurate, more invasive, and more persuasive digital advertisements to our customers’. But ultimately, that’s what this is about,” Carter says.

“We’ve already seen the enormous potential for harm that comes from targeted advertising, particularly political advertising. But also, Facebook’s terrible track record in being trusted with that data.”

When Zuckerberg unveiled his metaverse vision in a bizarre, highly stylised 1 hour and 17 minute-long video presentation at Facebook’s annual Connect conference on October 28, the role of advertising in his fantasy universe scarcely rated a mention. Instead, he spoke of a future where new digital economies and jobs would be created as people and businesses bought, sold and traded products in virtual marketplaces. The metaverse would be a work-in-progress for decades, he said, but many tech advancements would be made in the next five to 10 years.

“We have to fit hologram displays, projectors, batteries, radios, custom silicon chips, cameras, speakers, sensors to map the world around you and more into glasses that are about five millimetres thick,” he says in the video.

“In this future, you will be able to teleport instantly as a hologram to be at the office without a commute, at a concert with friends, or in your parents’ living room to catch up. This will open up more opportunity no matter where you live.”

Advertising underpins Facebook/Meta’s business model. About 97 per cent of the company’s $US85.9 billion ($115.4 billion) in revenue in 2020 came from advertising, mostly by selling ad space on Facebook and Instagram. Carter says AR and VR technology will allow Facebook to capture data about its users that it cannot otherwise gather once you walk away from the computer or phone.

“In order to work, augmented reality and indeed Facebook’s VR headset have to collect information about the environment around the user,” Carter says.

“With VR data they’ve got data about 100 per cent of your experience - how you saw it, where you looked. The next generation of Facebook’s VR headset is going to have eye tracking.

“This is probably the most invasive surveillance technology we’re going to bring into our homes in the next decade.”

Facebook’s pivot was met with plenty of scepticism, with critics saying the timing points to a cynical rebrand designed to distance the company from Facebook’s rolling scandals. Others have argued the metaverse already exists as a graveyard strewn with ideas like Google Glass smart glasses, which have failed to catch on. But with Zuckerberg pledging to invest at least $US10 billion this year on metaverse development and proposing to hire 10,000 workers across the European Union over the next five years, there is a looming question for policymakers about how this ambition can or should be regulated.

Michela Ledwidge, who runs Sydney-based studio Mod, says the metaverse is not a new concept. Smaller players like her company, set up in 2010, have been developing and creating extended reality and virtual productions for years.

“Whether or not the metaverse will continue to develop or not isn’t really a question. It’s just an ongoing evolution,” she says. “It is possible to have Metaverse development â€" and the metaverse can exist â€" without Facebook.

“The good news is that there are companies like Modzilla who have invested millions in trying to build metaverse technologies that can be given away as open source, to sort of act as a bit of a dyke against this onslaught of Apple, Google [and] Facebook tech that really is trying to lock you into their vision.”

A real concern, she says, is that Facebook already dominates the VR market, primarily through their Oculus Quest headsets (renamed Meta Quest as part of the rebrand), which are sold at a loss. Facebook acquired Oculus VR, a virtual reality gaming startup, for $US2 billion in 2014, and it has gone on to conquer as much as 60 per cent of the headset market.

“If Facebook dominates the hardware market then yes, it’s going to be very hard for the sector to grow in a healthy way,” Ledwidge says.

“If teenage girls are being harmed through the absorbing of Instagram feeds, what happens when your eye movements are being tracked and your head movements are being tracked?”

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has been scrutinising Facebook and Google’s market power through its multi-year digital platforms inquiry. ACCC boss Rod Sims has said he is closely watching the US government’s lawsuit against Facebook, which centres on the argument that the company violated antitrust laws by buying Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 to eliminate them as rivals and consolidate its monopoly.

But the metaverse, in its nascent state, has so far flown under regulators’ radar.

“It was really sad to see in the US that when [regulators] started saying ‘should Facebook be broken up?’ they spent a lot of time talking about WhatsApp and Instagram. But no one mentioned Oculus,” Ledwidge says.

Labor’s shadow spokesman for cybersecurity, Tim Watts, says all the current policy dilemmas around Facebook’s dominance of social media and its control over advertising channels on its platforms could emerge in relation to the metaverse. But how can you regulate what doesn’t exist yet?

“It’s really quite difficult to be any more specific than that because Facebook’s proposal is pretty amorphous. It’s sort of shadowboxing at the moment,” he says.

Watts also doubts whether Facebook’s vision will become a reality. “I can’t imagine that Google, Apple, Microsoft or Amazon would sleepwalk their way into a world where Facebook is running the metaverse and setting the rules for the next stage of the internet,” he says.

“Regulators are an important part of this and governments are an important part of this, but the immediate source of conflict will be all those other entities that are not going to want a world where Facebook set the rules to emerge.”

Should Mark Zuckerberg be master of the metaverse?Credit:Digital image: Matt Davidson

Digital Rights Watch’s Lizzie O’Shea says regulators “absolutely need to be on the front foot” to avoid repeating the problems of the past, when the tech giants rapidly grew into behemoths by gobbling up smaller competitors.

“Regulators are up against it in some ways because once you have a company the size of Facebook, they can subsidise mass rollout of infrastructure below cost, which gives them that dominance,” she says. “That obviously rings alarm bells for me.”

In his video presentation, Zuckerberg promised that no single company would run the metaverse and that “privacy and safety needs to be built into the metaverse from day one”. Nick Clegg, Facebook’s head of global affairs and communications, in a cameo in the presentation, assured viewers that this time around transparency would be central to the company’s endeavours and suggested policymakers would have time to grapple with regulations because “we have years until the metaverse we envision is fully realised”.

”That means being transparent about how things work, what data was collected, and how that data is used over time. It also means giving people easy-to-use safety controls, as well as age guidance and parental controls for when youngsters are using these products,” Clegg said.

The company’s pivot comes as it is in damage control over the Facebook Papers, a scandal that evolved from the leak of troves of documents, initially to the Wall Street Journal, by former product manager-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen.

The Journal’s coverage included a damning report citing internal research by Facebook that showed it knew Instagram was worsening body image issues among teenagers. A consortium of news outlets, including The New York Times, have since published streams of stories about the company’s knowledge of the spread of misinformation, conspiracy theories and hate speech on its platform and the propensity for users to be radicalised by extremist material.

Facebook has responded to the articles by claiming they were built on a “false premise”, with spokesman Andy Stone saying in a statement last month: “Yes, we’re a business and we make profit, but the idea that we do so at the expense of people’s safety or wellbeing misunderstands where our own commercial interests lie.”

Carter, who researches the ethical challenges associated with emerging tech like VR and AR, says metaverse technologies have the potential to fundamentally change the world in a positive way. They will revolutionise developments in areas like health, education and socialising, he says.

“I want to emphasise I’m excited by these technologies,” he says. “The metaverse is not in and of itself a bad thing.”

The question, he says, is whether Facebook can be trusted to responsibly shape the future of the metaverse.

“We know the internet is a place filled with harassment, misogyny and hate groups. Are we prepared to bring that into the physical world? Are we prepared to stop that from being replicated in these new digital spaces that are so closely entwined with the real world?”

Lisa Visentin is a federal political reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, covering education and communications.Connect via Twitter or email.

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