MetaverseUA Chair Research Paper #2 – Personal Data processing within Immersive Virtual Worlds: Privacy challenges in the interconnected data-driven Metaverse

We are pleased to announce the release of the second paper in our series, MetaverseUA Chair Research Papers titled ‘Personal Data processing within Immersive Virtual Worlds: Privacy challenges in the interconnected data-driven Metaverse‘, authored by Pablo Trigo, Researcher at LSTS, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium), and Vagelis Papakonstantinou, one of the members of the Chair’s Scientific Committee and Professor of Law at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium).

The abstract of this second publication can be found below:

The metaverse is a virtual space that merges the physical and digital worlds into a dynamic, interconnected, and data-driven environment. This virtual setting depends on technologies, platforms, tools, and devices designed to process large-scale and real-time big data. The ability to collect, store, and seamlessly connect massive datasets generated by metaverse interactions -including declared, observed, and inferred personal data- is growing rapidly. The immersive experiences of virtual worlds exacerbate hyper-connectivity and data-gathering challenges, which may intensify or alter the existing issues raised by big data processing models and their underlying technologies. This study aims to explore the complex landscape of data protection in virtual interactive settings. The main goal is to identify and analyse the most urgent privacy and data protection challenges that need to be solved to enable the development of trustworthy and secure metaverse ecosystems.

This paper is part of our ongoing research efforts under the Chair’s new publication series. Over the coming weeks, we will be releasing additional papers inspired by insights from speakers in our first seminar cycle.

If you want to be informed about all our upcoming activities and publications, please subscribe to our mailing list.