With the increasing interest and investments from many companies into this relatively nascent space, there's an open question around how privacy will be treated once or if the adoption picks up. Like we've seen in the past, whenever there are technological shifts, challenges emerge. In this case the challenges revolve around a lack of fundamental technical knowledge around virtual reality, limited exposure of the ecosystem to policy makers and general lack of confidence in consumers' mindsets.
That said, the metaverse could offer the opportunity for companies and brands to learn from their past digital marketing efforts and create a privacy compliant marketing environment from the start. The development of the metaverse may be similar to the development and evolution of the internet including the role that advertisers play as new ecosystems are developed. It is therefore important for brands to actively engage in privacy conversations and play an active role in shaping the privacy framework for this new digital world.
Earlier, web cookies used to play an important role for tracking consumer behavior. However, Google plans to wind this down by 2023 which offers the opportunity to incubate safer methods for tracking such as contextual marketing that can be implemented in the meta verse. Another avenue to explore is to integrate community based decision making such as "community-based commerce" on TikTok that brands have leveraged to promote their products.
https://www.marketingdive.com/news/why-metaverse-could-be-breakthrough-privacy-compliant-digital-marketing/610661/
