The Metaverse:Why Facebook is the problem.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of weeks the Metaverse is all the new rage.
What is the Metaverse, you may be asking young naive child.
Essentially Facebook( yup there’s only one of those around ) recently rebranded themselves as Meta. While this incites no immediate changes onto their current social platforms such as Whatsapp , Facebook( duh )and of course Instagram. The only difference you’ll see for these apps is a “Brought to you by Meta” at the Bottom when you open them instead of a “Brought to You By Facebook”.
So then what’s all the fire about?
Well, the main reason Facebook has changed themselves into Meta is because they are investing , what seems to be millions , into what is going to be called the metaverse.
They bought Oculus which was the current reality in the Virtual reality market who provided some of the best VR kit available for consumer use.
Why?
To Build the metaverse.
Essentially imagine everything you have physically right now. Your house, your belongings and heck even your currency. The Metaverse’s aim is to try and transfer and store all that in a virtual reality. Imagine real life but in a fake world where you can truly be anyone or anything you want to be.
Sounds cool and its not unlike a lot of Virtual Reality video games such as Rec Room( of which I have played extensively). However with a company as big as Facebook it’s bound to be a much more immersive and interactive experience and not just SOME Video game.
It’s probably going to re define social media and social interactions soon enough much like what Facebook did only a few years ago when they first launched Facebook.
Some of you may very well be extremely excited and that’s Ok. It could be very well a wonderful new era of technology and everything I say here may be absolute bogus.
You never know.
So this is more of a cautious prediction rather than concrete.
In my opinion I think the main issue with The Metaverse is that Facebook is the company behind it.
Unless you’re someone who uses their services extremely lightly without too much thoughts then you will know that Facebook is extremely notorious for extracting user data to feed it to advertisement companies who then directly feed you ads based on what you’ve been searching, liking, etc.
Now granted this method of revenue isn’t exclusive to facebook. Pretty much any app that is free and has advertisements use this technique to make some sort of revenue. This means Google, Twitter and Youtube do the same.
While sometimes its at a user’s benefit, because perhaps it gives you better ads for things you’d actually wanna buy, it also comes with the risk of having your privacy taken away. Like do companies really need your contact information, location, etc all the time? If you think about it that’s kinda invasive.
Now I’m not the only one who’s talked about this stuff. Facebook has it’s entire controversy history built around this. So then Why Am I talking about this?
Well considering it’s Facebook who’s creating the Metaverse….yeah I think you can see where this is going.
What else are they going to extract from you? Remember this isn’t just a app where you like something, you look at something and search something.
NO.
This is literally a new universe that’s unfolding here. For goodness sakes it said you can transfer things from your real world into the Metaverse. Who knows what information it could collect from you? You’re willingly handing over a version of yourself to Facebook. That means in essence Facebook could literally have the ability to download YOU.
I don’t if that scares you but once again this incites a level of invasion that is unheard of.
Now would I be excited for the Metaverse if it was made by a company like Google?
NO.
Google is almost just as bad as Facebook in terms of how much data they collect from users. Google just hasn’t been caught in as much as hot water for the data they’ve collected unlike Facebook.
What I would like to see is A Non Profit company take a shot at this. Now I realize this Metaverse concept is likely to expensive of a project for a Non Profit to attempt considering most of them use donations as their main source of revenue and…..well that isn’t a stable method at making money of paying the hundreds of employees who probably worked day and night to ensure everything is up and running.
But if one does make the Metaverse At least I’ll know that they aren’t doing it to make money and sell you to advertisement companies. I know they are doing it because they genuinely think it’s a good idea.
