You may have heard the news that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, saw a steep decline in its stock price Wednesday. The social media giant’s share value plummeted 23 percent after it announced Facebook lost users last quarter for the first time ever.
As an unabashed critic of Facebook’s outsize power, let me say, first: Hooray! You can’t see me right now, but I’m hitting the running man in celebration.
During an earnings call Wednesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said having to compete for users’ attention with other social media apps — primarily, TikTok — is an obstacle that could inhibit Facebook’s growth in the future.
But I’m more interested in another obstacle to growth that Meta officials cited: new rules around privacy. These rules could be fatal to what’s become Meta’s near-singular focus on building the “metaverse,” a virtual world accessible through goggles or glasses.
Meta lost $10 billion last year building the metaverse, the company said. What’s more, it said a fairly new security feature on Apple devices that prevents apps from collecting and selling some user data will cost it $10 billion this year. The feature, known as App Tracking Transparency, requires apps to ask users for permission to track their activity across other apps and websites.
Essentially, turning it on makes it more difficult for companies to show you car ads after you search “cars” online.
Why is this terrible for Meta? Well, the company has long said these features hurt platforms like Facebook and Instagram financially. Meta, after all, makes much of its money from collecting your data and selling it to advertisers. But those security policies could endanger Facebook’s metaverse plans.
Investing deeply in virtual reality, in a world growing increasingly skeptical of sharing data, could be a recipe for disaster. That’s because the virtual world will likely require a ton of users’ data to function. Using 3D avatars could require facial recognition, using virtual gyms could require access to our heart rate or breathing rate, and there will be ample opportunity in VR games and apps for you to share data about the volume and timbre of your voice.
As virtual reality researcher Jeremy Bailenson wrote in 2018, “Spending 20 minutes in a VR simulation leaves just under 2 million unique recordings of body language.” Theoretically, those recordings would be as good as gold for Meta — assuming there weren’t restrictions on how the company could use them.
That’s why the news of privacy regulations taking a toll on Meta in the coming year is so big, in my view. Collecting heaps of data isn’t just fundamental to the company’s past and present. Its future will rely on it, as well.
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Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. Recommended
