It's something so recent that it's not prudent to talk about it. We often talk about how technology, like life itself, moves faster than the rules that try to regulate it, and in terms of privacy and data protection, we're very used to it being like that.
The maximum expression of this situation is found right now with the metaverse, a virtual environment that pushes any previous approach to people and technology to the limit. The Spanish Data Protection Agency defines the metaverse as a virtual environment that is fully dataified from its design and conception, and therefore can be very intrusive. The set of data that is dealt with in it increases exponentially, so the new challenges to delimit what until now we thought we had more or less controlled are capitalized.
The metaverse is the elevation of activity in social networks to an extreme level, surpassing the simple discursive or visual contribution of the networks that we know now, and taking it to the point of including dimensions such as social, economic, political or emotional. In other words, virtualizing all aspects of a person's development. The approach of the metaverse is that you can have a full life in a virtual world. It is an absolutely immersive experience in virtual spaces and there you can act socially with a digital identity absolutely isolated from the real world, if you want. If we think about it, the applications are infinite. So? How can you try to regulate this minimally? Economy, leisure, games, work, education, health... And of course, in all of this there is a business opportunity, so who wants to miss it? Not even to miss the train.
We must agree with the reflections that the AEPD is making on the metaverse in terms of detecting risks in many areas, whether it is mass surveillance, discrimination, loss of personal autonomy, fraud or identity theft. And as it says, even personal risks, to the extent that it can affect one's own health.
We are not prepared for everything that may come to mean allowing life, real or virtual, to revolve around decisions of certain algorithms. And it is no longer science fiction. Now it may seem that all this is far from us and that the common day to day, our ordinary work is out of this reach. But going back to what we said at the beginning, this is happening at breakneck speed.
