AWE 2021 Day Three: XR Safety, the Future of Games, and the Closing Address

ARPost reports on Day 3 of the Augmented World Expo 2021, back in person in Santa Clara (CA), highlighting the Metaverse Privacy, Security & Safety in the Era of Constant Reality Capture panel (curated by XRSI and featuring our CEO, Kavya Pearlman, and our advisors Dennis Bonilla and Kristina Podnar).

Early on day three, Pearlman led a panel discussion featuring NativeTrust Consulting, LLC Digital Policy Advisor Kristina Podnar, and Baltu Studios co-founder and CTO Dennis Bonilla. Pearlman kicked it off by asking if Web1 was made by idealists and Web2 was made by capitalists, who will make Web3? Bonilla went in the direction of data risks and concerns.

“Every movement that’s being remotely sensed is being sent to a log or database or something,” Bonilla said, specifically of “telemetry” – or remotely collected and interpreted data. “Twenty or thirty years ago, most of us were generating a lot less telemetric data.”

While people might understand when their computer, phone, or even watch or headset can collect certain data, they don’t often know what is being done with it or where it ends up. Some people don’t care, but other people just assume that laws are protecting them or their data, which isn’t necessarily the case.

“We can’t just be consumers of good governance and safety,” said Podnar. “The only way to do that is to grow up and own that space or we’ll never have the opportunity to be the kind of responsible consumers that we want to be.”

Opportunities to “grow up and own that space” are everywhere, for example, at the XR Safety Week happening virtually in December.

“We have to take this shot to protect the metaverse, and we’re probably three years ahead,” said Pearlman. “Which is good.”