Security Risks and Privacy Challenges in the Metaverse

Metaverse (Meta = Beyond, Verse = Universe), a world beyond this universe, is a term intimidating enough on its own. Metaverse will be a world of mixed reality, mixing real and digital, where we will have new technology to capture more data that has never been captured till now.

- Sandeep Lodha

It will give enough time for the experts to work on the privacy and security concerns it can generate. Most of the top companies like Microsoft and Apple are putting their hats in the ring, whereas Facebook sees it as the most critical piece to their business in coming times.

Ongoing Privacy Issues

While we are addressing privacy issues on social media, Metaverse is anything but going to exacerbate those concerns. According to data collected by Hootsuite, 3.48 billion people are connected to some form of social media, which is forty-five per cent of the world's population. Social media collects a huge amount of personal information, much more than what we think we are sharing. This data does not have much regulation from the government as of now, and any analytic into this data can get some precious insight into the personal information that is used to understand people and try and influence them based on this. Phishing attempts in 2021 have doubled since 2020, as per the APWG Phishing Activity Trends Report. Botnets, where the social media bots are some forms of automated accounts, the sole purpose will be to dig into the personal data and try and monetize these. Malware is the other form that people need to deal with. None of these issues are going to go away, and probably in the new proposed Metaverse, it will be anything but further multiply these concerns.

The new proposed Metaverse