The Ethics of Augmented and Virtual Reality: Navigating Privacy and Digital?Rights

Augmented and Virtual Reality platforms have been trying to get mass adoption for years now. The challenge has been the adoption of devices and the availability of faster networks to access the platforms.

However, over the past few years, many companies have launched hardware that has made it considerably accessible for users to access augmented and virtual reality platforms.

Many companies have also started creating exclusive events and experiences for brands in these virtual worlds.

While users are adopting these platforms faster, more and more questions on the privacy and digital rights of users are coming into question.

Privacy in Augmented Reality and Virtual?Reality

We spend considerable time online today. Although it’s a different medium, we still interact and engage with other individuals, like in real life. Still, because it is online, some of us tend to behave differently than in our offline lives.

The concept of digital citizenship was put together to counter this and set better practices. Digital citizenship is simple: one should ensure that others can navigate the digital world safely and responsibly while engaging with others respectfully.

It focuses on reminding ourselves regularly that it’s humans like us that we are talking to or engaging with on the other side of the screen and positively using digital technologies.

The same concepts should also be applied to augmented and virtual reality environments. These environments are more social than usual internet platforms; the ability to see avatars (representations of individuals) and the potential to even touch and interact in unique ways makes it more important to be a better digital citizen.

Although the onus of being a good digital citizen in virtual communities is on users, it is essential for AR/VR developers to also think from this perspective when they are designing and building these platforms for their users. Developers need to consider the ethics of what kind of communities they want to develop for their users.

This drives us to take a step back and think about how safe the users would feel in their creating environment. Are they ensuring that the users can choose who they interact with in these virtual worlds, or what information regarding them is showcased when someone highlights or selects their avatar in this environment?

This kind of safety and privacy-focused thoughts will define the environment better for the users, which will keep users safe and prevent malicious users from finding ways to make this environment unsafe for other users.

Innovation in AR/VR allows users to interact with these virtual environments in new and unique ways. It is fascinating for developers as they want to implement these in their platforms and showcase their skills.

However, developers need to consider how valuable and ethical these innovative ideas are when they have to be implemented into the virtual platform.

For example, think of technologies like haptic feedback for touch; the idea for the innovation is to enable the users to feel the action when they are playing a fighting game or doing basic tasks like shaking hands with someone in the virtual environment. However, someone in the virtual environment could misuse the exact haptic feedback mechanism to touch another user inappropriately.

This is why it is essential to have an ethical view and understanding of how and why an innovation should be deployed on a virtual platform.

Most virtual platforms are singular, i.e., one individual engaging with an environment; hence, ethical challenges focused on interactions with other individuals do not come into play. However, regarding the content these platforms enable the users to interact with, it is essential to ensure some checks are in place.

Companies like Veriff, which provide verification services for identity and account verification, have extended these services to virtual platforms like Metaverses, which ensures that age-inappropriate content is blocked for users who do not fall in the suitable age bracket.

Similarly, duplicate accounts can be identified, and restrictions can be deployed if one of the known accounts has reports against it. This ensures no opportunity for abusive users to create new accounts to enter these virtual platforms.

Digital Rights and Responsibilities

The focus on ethics within the AR/VR industry is something developers, users and platform owners should know and ensure they are working towards making it a core pillar of their mission.

As more and more innovations in the virtual world become available, they will bring up newer ethical concerns and challenges that platforms should consider and ensure they work through them correctly.

As discussed above, there are innovations like haptic feedback, which can bring in a lot of challenges with privacy and ethics of what users should do on these platforms. Additionally, creating virtual influencers could expand into these virtual worlds, where it becomes challenging to differentiate between a real human being and a virtual bot. This could impact the quality of the interactions and lead to misinformation that could be spread through these bots easily.

As users start exploring these platforms from a young age, it will become not just a challenge to lock age-inappropriate content but also work on how these young people’s transition from young kids to adults is handled on these platforms.

Most large virtual platforms are taking initiatives today to ensure that they set the proper ethical behavior for users to follow while using these platforms. Apart from them, even the World Economic Forum has shown interest in and supported that there needs to be better safety mechanisms for metaverse and other virtual platforms.

The need is high, especially for human rights, legal and governments, to work closely with AR/VR platforms to ensure they are safe for the users.

Best Practices for AR/VR Development and?Usage

The best place to start is to create a set of best practices that developers, users and platform owners should adhere to to ensure a better experience for everyone.

Here are a few that we think would be good to start with:

• Have better verification of user details. Preferably use a government-approved identification.
• Have ethics and safety teams to ensure that users who misbehave are immediately penalized for their actions.
• Have better access controls to lock inappropriate content for specific users (especially age-specific content).
• Have better reporting and banning mechanisms for users to report inappropriate behavior (also have an excellent mechanism to verify this and ensure that this reporting mechanism is not abused in the first place).
• Have the ability to restrict certain words or actions that can be performed online.

Navigating the future of AR/VR?ethics

Ethics is a solid need to become one of the top focuses for virtual platform owners. There are a lot of examples of issues like groping, child-inappropriate behavior, racial discrimination and misuse of digital currency that users have already been facing on existing platforms.

This is why both existing and new platforms should rethink how ethics can be improved in their platforms. As innovations in virtual platforms emerge, it is more likely to open up opportunities for more abuse and inappropriate behaviors.

Developers and platform owners should ideally follow the best practices listed above and think about not just what the users can do on my platform. Still, they should focus on creating a list (followed by tasks) to focus on what the users should not be doing on my platform.

This thought process should enable them not just to create a great platform that can be used by every user equally but also help the users to become good digital citizens and have better access to their privacy and digital rights in a better way.