Detlef Schmuck demands “Protection of privacy as a human right in the virtual world”.
Hamburg, February 3, 2022 – Data security expert Detlef Schmuck, managing director of Hamburg-based data service provider TeamDrive GmbH and co-author of the newly published book “Metaverse” (ISBN 978-3-947818-87-7), calls for “more data protection in the Metaverse.” After the world’s largest social network Facebook 2021 renamed itself Meta, the Metaverse is on everyone’s lips.
“In the process, people are discussing avatars in three-dimensional worlds, new business models and an emerging billion-dollar market, but no one is talking about data protection or data security,” Detlef Schmuck has noted. He warns: “We can’t leave the protection of our privacy in the next development stage of the Internet to Mark Zuckerberg of all people, who has sufficiently shown that data protection is not a priority for him.”
Detlef Schmuck explains the background: “The Internet was developed from military roots by tech nerds before the US digital corporations took it over. None of these three groups has any significant interest in data protection. Now that the Internet is evolving, it’s high time to at least enshrine in the Metaverse the protection of individual privacy from government, commercial and technical intrusion.”
Meta/Facebook has held out the prospect of moving more than a billion users over to its Horizon Metaverse platform by 2024. Analysts predict the Metaverse will have a market value of more than 700 billion by then. OpenSea, the world’s largest marketplace for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which are considered a key technology for value creation in the Metaverse, cracked the $10 billion mark in transaction volume in 2021.
“Given these figures, we need personal protection in the Metaverse far beyond the General Data Protection Regulation,” argues Detlef Schmuck. He concretizes his demands for privacy protection as follows: “We need seamless end-to-end encryption based on the zero-knowledge principle. This means that platform operators must not possess any keys to user data so that they can neither sell their customers’ personality profiles for advertising purposes nor pass them on to the U.S. authorities.”
