Uncovering Privacy in the Metaverse from an Identity Perspective: A Literature Review

Privacy in the Metaverse has garnered increased attention among researchers and practitioners. The extensive data collection about users’ real and virtual identities, which can represent two distinct entities, raises the need for an overview of identity-related data objects from a privacy perspective in this context. Through a literature review of works encompassing academic sources, industry white papers, and privacy policies, we use grounded theory methods to identify a comprehensive set of simple and complex data objects in the Metaverse. Based on this, we inductively theorize a model proposing possible privacy-relevant inference relationships within and across user profiles. This novel model contributes to privacy and identity literature, and we derive avenues for future IS research on privacy, identity, and data objects in the Metaverse.