Privacy in a Virtual World

An Interview with Crystal Nwaneri, explorer of the boundaries between law, intellectual property, and high-tech public policy.

“Where Is the Future?” is a series of interviews with industry leaders considering the potential and complexity of technology on the horizon.

Virtual reality offers great potential for entertainment and social media, but the trade-off might be loss of privacy and physical harm. Crystal Nwaneri raised these concerns and more in her paper “Ready Lawyer One: Legal Issues in the Innovation of Virtual Reality,” authored when she was a student at Harvard Law School and published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology. Nwaneri became interested in VR while working at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab as an undergraduate at Stanford University. In our conversation, she offered examples of several issues affecting users that the VR industry has yet to fully address.

Should we be worried about privacy because major companies like Google and Facebook are involved in VR? Or is privacy an issue with the technology itself?

Crystal Nwaneri: I look at it as the general issue of the technology itself. VR companies collect data on our physical movement—how you move through space. A mobile VR device, like a Samsung Gear, is…