The Complexity of the Data Ethics Dilemma in the Metaverse

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The Web3 community has a duty to establish a code of ethics to make the virtual landscape a safe place.

Imagine a world where a best-presented version of yourself can live out your dreams in an open digital landscape. The experiments will be complete and limited only by the imagination. This is the draw of the metaverse.

The metaverse sees the convergence of social media, the internet, and games in one place, and data serves as the DNA of the entire ecosystem. The fast-paced environment features custom avatars of controlling users. In the future, AI technology will take a few 2D images and render a whole 3D world around them. A captured photograph can become a highly photorealistic humanoid avatar in seconds.

These avatars - the online projections of the best digital versions of ourselves - could serve to feed our own vanities. In the world of Web 2.0, there is a thriving culture that allows social media users to anonymously bully and harass each other through transgressions that would never happen face-to-face. This is also prevalent in games, where the mindset is that the "character" is not representative of the actual person playing.

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When this character becomes a digitized replica of a real person - enabled through AI digitization - a user who watches this digitized representation of themselves mocking, beating or worse, will surely perceive these infractions of way more negatively than the same action applied to a cartoonish avatar.

This new developing ecosystem will pose ethical challenges for users and brands seeking to establish a deeper connection and resonance with consumers across the metaverse. But before companies can begin to address the ethical challenges and new norms of interaction in a digital landscape, organizations must begin to establish the frameworks and context for dialogue.

This first step is to develop a set of fundamental ethical principles and data guidelines that define the current profile of the individual today. By establishing guidelines that serve as a day-to-day guide in decision-making, the organization begins to build its culture, a foundation that will be well served in an increasingly digital future.

Brands will want to participate in this space to engage with consumers' digital experiences, but will certainly be cautious in association with an ethically compromised environment.

To date, we have yet to see ethical standards articulated and applied to the digital space, and the ecosystem only gets more complicated as we look to the future. It will be up to the brands to define and impose on the ecosystem the ethical standards that will be tolerated in these experiences.

Digital technology is changing at such a pace that legislation, and even society itself, is struggling to keep up. The main challenge may not be the metaverse, but rather the mindset and user expectations that inhibit it. All actors in the Web3 digital community will have the duty to establish an ethical code of conduct to make the virtual landscape a safe place in which users will want to interact.

Brands need to be educated on the potential of the metaverse as a new marketing activation channel, but also need to...