(Bloomberg) — Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg pledged that the Metaverse, the futuristic immersive reality platform he envisions for the coming decade, will have privacy standards, parental controls and disclosures about data use that his social network has famously lacked.
“Everyone who’s building for the Metaverse should be focused on building responsibly from the beginning,” Zuckerberg said during a video presentation on Thursday. “This is one of the lessons I’ve internalized from the last five years — that you really want to emphasize these principles from the start.”
For half a decade, Facebook has been bombarded with criticism from lawmakers, regulators and its own employees for its lax privacy standards. During the Thursday event — a lengthy demo of Facebook’s hardware and virtual-reality projects — Zuckerberg was joined briefly by Nick Clegg, the company’s government affairs chief.
Clegg said Facebook’s work in the Metaverse would have age and parental controls, as well as transparency about how data is used and collected. He also said the company would be consulting with human and civil rights groups, without naming them.
Regulators have been “playing catch-up” with internet advances because of consumer demands for fast technical progress, Clegg told his boss during the event. “I really think that it doesn’t have to be the case this time around,” he said. “Because we have years before the Metaverse we envision is fully realized.”
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