The metaverse challenges us to stretch our collective imaginations to the edges of our digital experience.
While building the navigation engine for the metaverse, we at Lighthouse have grown accustomed to thinking about its edge cases, mysteries, and unresolved dilemmas.
And we’d love to invite you into some of our late-night musings.
Nowadays, the habitual activities of our daily lives — working, banking, talking to friends, planning our week — take place almost entirely online. That makes digital rights just as essential as our physical ones.
Yet our protections continue to lag behind. Collectively, people still see virtual reality as somehow less “real” — and therefore, its consequences less serious. Here, in the penultimate installment of our six-part series on “The Edges of the Metaverse,” we pose five issues to grapple to protect human rights in the metaverse.
Key Takeaways
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The metaverse can be an enormous force for good, but will face significant human rights challenges as it scales, underscoring the need to act quickly on developing shared standards for protecting anyone using it.
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While some rights — such as freedom of religion and expression — seem obvious, there are also new questions to answer regarding what rights users have to own assets and move them freely across the metaverse, and, more broadly, what we’re allowed to do in virtual worlds.
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Finally, a metaverse that protects human rights must give users the option to opt out and walk away while still preserving access to essential services and economic opportunities, as these services and opportunities will increasingly move into the metaverse just as banking and communication once moved onto the internet.
The metaverse would ideally follow the same laws and principles that currently guide global human rights. But those laws don’t cover all metaverse usecases, in part because of the newness of the technology and also because there may be no legal precedent. So the metaverse requires rigorous, novel thinking around protections and human rights.
Many governments, think tanks, nonprofits, and leaders in the metaverse industry are at work drafting “immersive rights” and other frameworks for protecting human rights in the metaverse, with the European Union expected to release standards as soon as next year. Let’s explore the most pressing challenges they’ll need to address.
1. Protecting identity, consent, and privacy is critical to ensuring a humane metaverse experience.
Surveillance capitalism, or the business model of tracking your online activities to analyze, microtarget, and market things to you, is the core driver of the web2 internet economy. It’s the Faustian bargain we make in return for “free” Facebook, Instagram, Gmail, search, and the the other familiar and near-indispensable services of our daily digital lives.
That business model has proliferated for many reasons, with a major one being a lack of user ownership of and self-custody over their data.
“The first root cause of surveillance capitalism is a failure to build the Internet with a persistent, portable, and composable identity layer that allows users to self-custody their privacy decisions and self-govern how they connect, to what services, and under which conditions,” writes Lighthouse communications head Anastasia Uglova in her Privacy and Information Security M.S. thesis from the University of Texas at Austin.
Data exhaust, or “the trail of personal telemetry left behind by Internet users with little insight into or control over their digital footprints,” as she defines it, is valuable to marketers and bad actors alike because it can be used to predict and manipulate outcomes. “These outcomes can be as innocuous as influencing a purchase, or something altogether more alarming, such as polarizing an electorate and swaying a vote,” she writes.
Louis Rosenberg, a Stanford, NASA and US Air Force researcher turned founder of numerous VR and AR companies, has said the metaverse could be “the most dangerous tool of persuasion humanity has ever seen.”
As such, an essential part of “immersive rights,” Rosenberg writes, is experiential authenticity. In essence, it’s the right to know whether and whenever you are experiencing a promotional treatment versus an organic experience.
While advertising is pervasive (and oftentimes misleading), in the physical world and in the current iteration of the internet, most adults can discern when they’re presented with something promotional. The line is getting fuzzier, with ads on Facebook seamlessly interspersed into the newsfeed and promotional TikToks mixed in with unpaid UGC, but the user can still pause, inspect, and tell the difference.
That distinction could disappear altogether in the metaverse. Rosenberg gives the example of a user walking down a virtual street and overhearing a man telling someone else how much he loves his virtual car. Was that user overhearing an organic, unscripted conversation, or was it intentional product placement targeting that specific user at that precise instant based on that user’s digital habits? You may never know, but either way, you will have been impacted by it, Rosenberg writes.
This challenge of having agency and awareness about concealed influence and promotional targeting becomes even more pressing due to the introduction of biometrically inferred data. This data may include how much time your avatar spends looking at a product, how your pupils dilate in your headset when reacting to some stimulus, and even what subconscious facial cues you give as hints of your internal emotional response.
At a minimum, consumers should have the right not to have their emotions computationally assessed in realtime using trait detection at speeds that exceed natural human abilities, argues Rosenberg, but cautions that “even with informed consent, regulators should consider an outright ban on emotional analysis being used for promotional purposes.”
Such technologies could eventually mimic a brain-computer interface and even access a user’s alpha, beta, and gamma brainwaves, writes David Nuti, a Vice President at Nord Security, which leads him to ask a simple question: “What happens to privacy when our thoughts are not even protected?”
(To go deeper on this topic, read part three of this series.)
2. Rights must be even more expansive and permissioned in the metaverse.
In 1948, the United Nations passed its landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights … and has spent every year since in near constant struggle to define what exactly those rights might be, or even how to enforce them.
Some of the stated rights include the right to be born free and equal in rights without discrimination, to have the right to life, liberty, and security of person, the right to not be held in slavery or subjected to torture or arbitrary arrest, and the right to freedom of religion, opinion, and expression.
However, the metaverse introduces the need for new enumerated rights, including rights as simple as the right to breathe. After all, in the metaverse, every action you do is first permissioned by the platform itself. Who controls the platform — whether it’s a country or a company with a spotty human rights record — has profound impact on what users can do.
“To the extent that moving virtual limbs and seeing with virtual eyes is the equivalent of freedom of movement in a virtual world, no one who enters into a Metaverse of any kind has any autonomy,” writes Tiernan Ray, a columnist for ZDNET, in a piece declaring that “you can be anything you want in The Metaverse, you just can’t be in control.”
The right to breathe, the right to sit, the right to scratch your nose: in the metaverse, all the actions that we take for granted in the physical world must be platform permissioned in a virtual one. And they will become even more critical in a fully immersive metaverse that engages all of our senses.
The metaverse also opens the realm of the physically impossible, creating a host of other actions that a user may want to participate in, from flying to the highest heights to swimming to the deepest depths. Platform will have to decide whether to allow the user to perform the action or not.
As Ray writes: “Every identity in a virtual world is the creation of a private database. The individual human being has no control over that database. They can pick from a menu … But at the end of the day, people have no veto power. What the corporation decides is final.”
We at Lighthouse believe that interoperability is an essential building block of an open metaverse (we even wrote an entire report on this topic: The Road to Interoperability). We envision a metaverse where travelers can transport their identities, goods, and even preferences across virtual worlds without facing prohibitive costs or platform-imposed obstacles, and where user rights and affordances are more-or-less consistently and universally respected, regardless of the world they visit.
3. Decentralization is essential, but introduces unique challenges.
In many ways, Ray is correct that metaverse operators mostly have final say over what users do on their platforms. But ordinary people do have some veto power. For example, they can choose to leave an overly controlling or restrictive virtual world — or simply one they don’t like — for one that better serves their interests, needs, values, and, ultimately, rights.
Decentralization and open social graphs may offer consumer choice, and thus, more power. But it is not an unalloyed good. “With decentralization comes increased anonymity; and with this increased anonymity, more avenues for faceless abuse,” as analyst Kieron Allen writes for Acceleration Economy.
Microsoft already experienced a version of this when it had to shut down a number of public spaces in its social metaverse AltspaceVR for safety reasons in early 2022.
Of course, challenges around content moderation and managing harmful expression are nothing new on major social platforms. And it has been even more difficult to reign in the “dark web” of the text-based internet, where hotbeds for hate speech like as 4chan have long proliferated. How spicy do things get when hundreds, thousands, and even millions of worlds are created by anonymous users on decentralized, permissionless protocols that no single entity controls, governs, or protects?
Regulators will need to consider and contend with a digital environment where users on fringe platforms can inflict emotional, psychological, and — as more senses become available through wearables and immersion — physical pain online. The time to start planning for it is now and not retroactively, after the harm is already done, as has so often been the case with prior headline-grabbing digital abuse scandals.
4. Balancing moderation and censorship will become even more complicated.
Programmatically screening the text output of billions of users is difficult but doable. Doing the same for the concurrent physical and virtual activity of billions is orders of magnitude more difficult.
As mentioned earlier, every step — no, every twitch — in the metaverse requires permissioning. And while part of the equation is deciding what actions to allow, an even bigger question is how to even moderate all those actions. Many are infinitesimally small and invisible to human perception but nonetheless digitally trackable (and analyzable!), and happen in a fraction of a second.
The metaverse represents a moderation challenge far beyond the mostly text-based platforms we have contended with thus far. (The closest corollary today may be TikTok, which is struggling to oversee its short-form video content with a mix of both human moderators and AI tools.) The task is simply impossible when relying on human moderators, and artificial intelligence will be a critical component of overseeing that massive medley of moderation, as we previously covered in part one of our “Edge of the Metaverse” series.
Decentralization allows for greater freedom, community, and collaboration: key characteristics of an open metaverse. But the ability to empower those values will be determined in part by addressing some of its limiting challenges.
Here, again, interoperability is essential: “Achieving this requires infrastructure that can support the transfer of sensitive metadata across different blockchain protocols, metaverse platforms and gaming ecosystems in a blend of social media, crypto wallets and decentralized applications,” Witek Radomski writes for CoinTelegraph. “So, before an interoperable metaverse introduces new business models and cross-platform capabilities, the issue of multichain identity and moderation must be addressed.”
Some potential solutions include allowing for individual virtual communities to incentivize good behaviors and limit bad ones, allowing them to decide the line of acceptability for themselves. As Radomski points out, Decrypt’s PubDAO is one example, onboarding and integrating each of its community members into the culture to protect shared values.
However, that individual-focused approach is difficult to scale. Algorithms may help, as may AI, but that will be platform dependent in a decentralized metaverse with many virtual projects.
Radomski proposes one possible solution for this: a common metadata standard combined with decentralized identifiers (DIDs, similar to Vitalik Buletin’s concept of “soulbound tokens” but a much more rigorously researched and established standards) that allow moderation and accountability to transfer with users as they traverse the metaverse from world to world.
Still, even that solution presents more challenges: could one virtual world discriminate against a user, unfairly marking them with an immutable stigma that would restrict their actions and movements across some or all of that environment? Can all worlds read and understand DID documents and translate them into user actions in-world?
5. The metaverse must safeguard a user’s right to opt out of it.
The last section addressed choices between virtual worlds in the metaverse, but what about the choice to participate in the metaverse at all?
As the open metaverse search engine, Lighthouse benefits from the growth and expansion of users across the entire metaverse. We are confident that the metaverse will be a space that empowers thousands, millions, and perhaps one day, even billions, of people to transact, interact, socialize, shop, and live out their dreams.
But this spatial web should be an additive layer to our physical reality; it cannot and should not replace it.
Let’s imagine a metaverse that becomes an integral part of the human experience because people begin to depend on it to access essential services, such as communications, banking, and economic opportunity — exactly the way the internet has become indispensable today. In fact, the internet is so central to human life that access to it is increasingly considered a right, and certainly a leading indicator of socioeconomic mobility and status. And, while one of our greatest powers to oppose policies we disagree is the ability to walk away from an internet service and not use it, that power is rapidly decreasing as internet dependence grows. In theory, by withholding participation, people can put pressure on platforms to change their behavior and encourage competing platforms to offer better options. But in practice, how often do you read the terms of service and make a principled decision to opt out — especially if opting out comes with significant inconvenience? Even more importantly, how often do users opt out together in numbers sufficiently large to send the platform a clear signal about user preferences?
To some, the idea of a metaverse you can’t opt out of may seem unimaginable. But consider the experience many had during the COVID-19 pandemic, when restaurants, venues, and other businesses moved to completely cashless systems. Even as pandemic closures and restrictions faded, many of those businesses have kept those policies, so users cannot opt out of digital interactions without undertaking an inconvenience so significant as to be unrealistic.
Refusing to accept cash instantly disenfranchises a whole sector of the population: people who are unbanked — 1.4 billion globally in 2021, according to the World Bank — or otherwise have difficulty accessing financial services, such as a credit card or a checking or savings account. It also means that those who choose to not use those services — whether out of moral abstension or simply personal preference — have seen their ability to participate in contemporary life restricted in significant ways.
As the NAACP has written, financial institutions often charge monthly fees, impose penalties, and otherwise gatekeep applications in ways that make banking disproportionately off-limits for socioeconomically disadvantaged people and communities of color in particular.
That is just one (possibly imperfect) comparison, but it illustrates some of the challenges that a fully immersive metaverse poses. If most of the world’s economic and social activities move onto the spatial web, it will inevitably leave out those who cannot afford (or prefer not) to engage with it.
If users cannot vote with their feet and not use the metaverse — whether because future laws require using it or, more likely, because it is the only (or dominant) place to access opportunities and essential services — then users lose one of their most important tools for demanding better: their right to walk away.