Facebook/Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of the virtual reality-fueled future could bring new privacy risks to our homes and workplaces, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen said.
Last month, Zuckerberg announced that he would focus his company on the metaverse. While the concept has many meanings, to Zuckerberg, it’s an “even more immersive and embodied Internet,” where users can meet with friends, connect with colleagues, shop for goods and services, and so on. In other words, Zuckerberg wants to take people’s lives and put them inside a metaverse, preferably one he controls.
So what is “the metaverse,” exactly?
To Haugen, that’s a red flag. “Facebook should have a transparency plan for the metaverse before they start building all this stuff because they’ve demonstrated with regard to Facebook that they can hide behind a wall, they keep making unforced errors, they keep making things that prioritize their own profits over our safety,” she said in an interview with the Associated Press.
Haugen was a product manager at Facebook until April of this year. Before she resigned, she gathered tens of thousands of documents detailing various problems at the company, ranging from harms to teens’ mental health to ethnic violence to special treatment for VIPs. She handed the documents over to Congress, the Wall Street Journal, and regulators at the SEC, where she also filed a whistleblower lawsuit alleging that the company breached its fiduciary duty by hiding...
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