secondary title

Metaverse - The Digital Future Has Arrived

While all the talk of the Metaverse focuses on the future, it's safe to say we're already living in a world where there's no distinction between "reality" and the digital realm. From the creation of the first online chat rooms in 1980 to the Internet boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s, business, communication and entertainment have been going digital. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated our current permanent digital lives.

secondary title

A Potential Dystopian Future

After Facebook changed its name to Meta, and Epic, Roblox, Microsoft, and others established themselves as leaders in the Metaverse, it was clear that big tech companies were aggressively trying to grab market share in this nascent space. However, given their prioritization of profit growth over user privacy, and their spotty track record in resolving bad accidents, the big tech companies of the metaverse are trying to maintain control over our communications and connections. Many have wondered whether the metaverse in the hands of big tech companies with a history of setting constraints to protect their control will lead us into a surveillance-based dystopian digital future?

Just as we need rules to govern travel, commerce, and civic life in the real world, we need rules in the virtual world. For example, you need a passport and sometimes a visa to travel abroad. These are proofs of identity that prove you are who you are. In the real world, governments are the arbiters of truth. In the current iteration of the web, the tech giants are the arbiters of truth. We provide data about our identity in order to authenticate and use their platforms. However, things are not as beautiful as we imagined. The recent release of Facebook Files highlights problems in this regard, and Amazon has failed to live up to its promise to keep our data safe. In the vast, unexplored realm of the Metaverse, tech giants and gaming platforms are vying to be the arbiters — and we've all seen how rule makers bend the rules to suit their interests.

secondary title

Preserving Privacy in the Metaverse through Zero Knowledge

I believe in a world where corporations don't dictate our day-to-day lives and act as arbiters of our personal information. The technology to enable such a world already exists: Blockchain enables decentralized governance and data ownership. Just like physical rules, the rules in the blockchain are objective and cannot be misused, unlike technology giants who come up with subjective rules to meet their needs. But if people, not businesses, are going to establish the rules of the Metaverse, we need a secure and private way for users to prove their identity. This is where Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) come in.

You can think of zero-knowledge proofs as a proof-based verification system that relies on cryptography to prove "this is a fact about me" without revealing sensitive information. As an example, let's say you need to have certain superpowers to gain access to specific areas in the Metaverse (a world, a game, a group, an event), but you don't want to reveal any information about your physical identity to anyone or a business This leads to misuse of sensitive information. Zero-knowledge proofs, then, would let users prove that they possess the rights or superpowers needed to enter a realm without sharing any personally identifiable information. For example, you can remove any subjectivity from yourself and your own perspective by proving that you have the necessary credentials to join a group, event or digital location while keeping your identity and actual credentials private. You are proving the truth of a fact without revealing the fact itself.

secondary title

success or failure

The truth is, in order for the Metaverse to reach its potential, we need to remove concerns about the exploitation of private data by anyone or anything. The bad digital world nightmare already exists. Under the overbearing control of Meta and other big tech companies, our operations take place in a surveillance economy where every aspect of our lives is turned into data and sold to the highest bidder. In a lesser sense, this data may just be used to sell us products, however, it may even be used to manipulate, perpetuate hate crimes, discriminate, suppress freedom and equality, and other ills.

ReportReport, investigating the causes and solutions for the spread of misinformation and disinformation. This is an extremely harmful feature of the surveillance economy. The report highlights that misinformation and disinformation have become a matter of life and death. For example, mistrust of government, science, the news media, and other institutions has led to a huge misunderstanding of the risks of COVID-19, leading to severe hospitalization and death of patients.

The committee also dismissed the idea that the best way to tackle the spread of misinformation is to give people better access to correct information. However, the proliferation of correct information is simply not enough to solve the crux of the problem: an incentive system that keeps information permanently out of order. The report includes recommendations on how to go about addressing this societal issue, including a focus on public interest research, content moderation and disclosure, advertising transparency, and digital discourse that establishes norms of accountability and promotes good order.While these suggestions are worthy of approval, what we really need is to take practical action to build the infrastructure of a well-ordered and secure metaverse - zero-knowledge proofs are the only way to solve this problem.