XRSI Founder and CEO, Kavya Pearlman, has become the newest member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Coalition for Digital Safety. The Global Coalition for Digital Safety, launched in June 2021, is a global, public-private, multi-stakeholder cooperation platform for developing innovations and advancing collaborations that tackle harmful content and conduct online.
Before founding the XR Safety Initiative, Kavya advised Facebook on third-party security risks during the 2016 US Presidential elections, and worked as the head of security for Linden Lab, creator of the oldest existing virtual world, “Second Life”. As a member of the Global Coalition, Kavya joins other crucial stakeholders in the global online safety space, such as Julie Inman Grant, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Mykhailo Fedorov, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, and Melanie Dawes, Chief Executive at the Office of Communications (Ofcom).
Cathy Li, Head of Media, Entertainment, and Sports Industries at the World Economic Forum said “we are pleased to have XR Safety Initiative join the Global Coalition for Digital Safety to advance privacy, security, and ethics in the ongoing evolution of the internet. Mitigating safety risks in immersive environments, including the metaverse, is a key goal of the Coalition and we look forward to working with a diverse set of partners in achieving this goal.”
Commenting on her role in the Coalition, Kavya said that “Behind every avatar, there is likely a human being. Therefore, when we extend reality into other dimensions and move fast towards the next iteration of the internet, we need to honor human nature and protect our consciousness and prevent harm from happening.”
The Global Coalition for Digital Safety aims to accelerate public-private cooperation to tackle harmful content online and will serve to exchange best practices for new online safety regulations, take coordinated action to reduce the risk of online harm, and drive forward collaboration on programs to enhance digital media literacy. With the incoming mass adoption of immersive technologies, the concept of safety has expanded to include physical threats, permanent psychological challenges due to the blurring of boundaries between “real” and “virtual”, and the need to protect the unprecedented amount and quality of data collected, processed, and stored by the infrastructure of the next iteration of the Internet called the Metaverse.
