Privacy Challenges in the Metaverse

With the advent of the metaverse, multiple new challenges with respect to privacy and data protection may arise. Evolving from current and existing privacy debates, the use of metaverse technology on a large scale will impact on multiple aspects of the privacy and data protection domain.In this paper, we provide a generic categorization scheme for threats in metaverse privacy. Focusing on those privacy issues that are new or have a different level of relevance in the metaverse specifically, we iterate over challenges around metaverse infrastructure, virtual and augmented world representation, human-computer interaction, and legal compliance.