Australian Human Rights Commission Human Rights in the Digital Age: Additional Material Submitted to the UN Global Digital Compact, 30 April 2023 40. In protecting data, the protection of the human right to privacy should be enshrined in domestic legislation, in addition to existing international obligations, to best protect user data. Recommendation 6: Countries should ensure that their domestic legal framework includes protection for the right to privacy, with specific regard for the collection and use of data. 3.4 How new and emerging technologies may risk privacy 41. There is a serious need to consider the protection of data in respect of new and emerging technologies. The Metaverse is one prominent example of a new technology which threatens privacy. The Metaverse utilises virtual reality (VR) goggles and other technologies that are able to collect an unprecedented level of personal information. 42. While the Commission has raised previous concerns about the erosion of privacy in digital spaces,20 the Metaverse creates an unprecedented risk to privacy and data. The risk of privacy and security invasions in the Metaverse (inherited from underlying technologies or emerging from the new digital ecology) may be prolific.21 43. The Metaverse is a nebulous digital construct which is constantly evolving – but broadly speaking it can be considered as the next generation of the internet with the aim to be a fully immersive, hyper-spatiotemporal, and self-sustaining virtual shared space for humans to play, work, and socialize.22 This allows individual users to live as ‘digital natives’ and experience an alternative virtual life,23 while at the same time having the ability to facilitate transactions and activities that also have a presence in the physical world. 44. The personal data involved in the Metaverse will likely be ‘more granular and unprecedentedly ubiquitous to build a digital copy of the real world’.24 The fusion of this granular data collected by Metaverse technologies and more traditional data collected by social networking platforms may compromise privacy at heightened levels. Such a fusion, or interoperability of data, may create unpredictably deeper data profiles about individuals.25 45. The Metaverse collects and processes vast amounts of data such as: 10 • biometrics • facial expressions • eye movements