JAKARTA - Last month the CEO of Facebook or currently better known as Meta Inc, Mark Zuckerberg, said he would focus his company on the metaverse. However, the statement was denied by Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen.
Haugen said Zuckerberg's vision of a virtual reality-based future could bring privacy risks to homes and workplaces.
For Zuckerberg, it's a more immersive and real Internet, where users can meet friends, connect with colleagues, shop for goods and services, and more. But for Haugen, it was a red flag.
“Facebook should have a transparency plan for the metaverse before they start building all this stuff, because they've shown with respect to Facebook that they can hide behind walls, they keep making unintentional mistakes, they keep making things that prioritize their own gain. than our safety," Haugen said.
For information, Haugen was product manager at Facebook until April this year. Before resigning, he collected tens of thousands of documents detailing a range of issues at the company, from juvenile mental health disorders to ethnic violence to special treatment for VIPs.
He submitted the documents to Congress, the Wall Street Journal, and regulators at the SEC, where he also filed a whistleblower lawsuit alleging that the company violated fiduciary obligations by hiding many issues from shareholders.
After the Haugen bombing, Facebook changed the name of its parent company to Meta, and Zuckerberg began touting the metaverse as the social media company's next innovation.
Haugen said the move was an attempt to distract from the company's problems. Haugen voiced concern that Facebook's metaverse would only add to the problems existing on the company's current platform.
He also worries that Facebook's goal of bringing the metaverse into the workplace will leave people with no choice but to hand over more personal data to the company.
“In terms of the workplace, we can't choose to be in that space. If your employer decides that they are now a metaverse company, you should provide more personal data to the company showing that it is lying whenever it is in its best interest," Haugen explained as quoted by ArsTechnica, Wednesday, November 10.
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