Back in the 1990s, Neal Stephenson imagined a fully immersive world you’d enter using virtual reality goggles. He called it the metaverse.
Nowadays, people think of the metaverse as a mix of virtual and augmented reality that blends digital stuff with real life. It’s also seen as a huge business opportunity, potentially worth $13 trillion and reaching five million users by 2030. So it’s no surprise companies are scrambling to get involved, with Facebook even changing its name to “Meta” to ride the metaverse wave.
Looking at it from a human rights angle, the metaverse does offer some cool benefits. For example, it can support health rights. Already, tech linked to the metaverse is being used to treat lazy eye in kids and help find tumors during medical scans. Plus, it’s improving education by making learning more accessible worldwide and enhancing how students engage with material.
But on the flip side, there are also human rights risks tied up in all this. Privacy is a big one – just like past tech advances have done before. Most of us know how our data gets collected and shared online without much control. Usually that means info like names or credit card numbers might be at risk. The metaverse just ramps this up even more; one expert described it as “data collection on steroids.”
That’s because this new tech can capture way more detailed info about us – things like where we look, how we hold our bodies, our voices, even little facial movements like scrunching noses will get tracked. This biometric data then gets used to make guesses about who we are.
For instance, tracking eye movement alone can reveal tons about someone – gender, age or ethnicity for starters – but also deeper stuff like fears, hobbies or sexual preferences. So you might jump into a game in the metaverse only to accidentally spill private details about yourself without realizing it.
The metaverse also brings up questions around autonomy. Human rights protect our ability to make choices (“our normative agency”), so anything limiting that affects those rights too. In fact, some call what happens in the metaverse “patiency” – basically being passive or acted upon rather than active decision-makers ourselves. Often users don’t have much say over what happens to them there.
In short: while there are definite upsides for human rights within the metaverse, there are clear challenges too. That leads us to ask who should regulate this space so people aren’t harmed.
The answer starts with remembering something important: no matter where we live on Earth, everyone has human rights-as stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And states have an international legal duty to protect those rights.
The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights tell us businesses have different duties than states do when it comes to these rights. Unlike states which must protect and fulfill human rights obligations fully, businesses only need to respect those rights.
This makes sense offline because states govern territories-they pass laws ensuring people’s rights stay protected inside their borders.
But online in the metaverse? It’s not clear who really holds “sovereign authority.” Could be the company owning a platform; could be whichever country they’re based in; maybe even individual owners of virtual lands where issues happen.
Though figuring out exactly who enforces human rights here is tricky right now, what stands out is that traditional ideas-states having main responsibility-don’t quite fit anymore since businesses build these spaces from scratch anyway. Basically companies running parts of the metaverse might act like rulers themselves now-that suggests they should take on bigger roles respecting-and maybe protecting-human rights than current guidelines say.
A possible solution would be creating something like a Metaverse Charter of Human Rights laying out what needs protecting digitally and spelling out business obligations clearly too. Every platform owner or land holder could be required follow its rules; if they don’t compliance could be enforced through international courts or arbitration bodies.
Still though-even if businesses’ duties expand-states shouldn’t step back either. Governments could set protocols making sure human rights get respected inside these virtual worlds; create laws regulating both personal info and biometric data collection closely; enforce penalties via independent agencies when companies break these rules-all crucial oversight roles for states here.
If we want real protection for people using the metaverse then both business efforts AND state regulations need to work together tightly-or else risk turning this new frontier into some kind of digital wild west threatening basic freedoms instead.
Find out more by reading Business and Human Rights Journal on this subject.
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