Month: May 2022

Finally – the light at the end of the COVID tunnel. As the world continues to reopen with countries such as Singapore and Spain both welcoming fully vaccinated travelers, the US has followed suit in loosening restrictions for foreign entrants. Is simply having an open border enough to stimulate international tourism to the US? Traditionally, the US has been considered a “travel later” destination; this has largely been the mentality for everyone from Canadian and Mexican travelers close to home, all the way through to those that are an 8+ hour trip away. Ranking within the top 10 destinations for international travel in 2019, the US was also the only country to report a decline in tourism from the year prior. Evidently, tourists have been playing hard to get – but the US is ready to commit to touristic stability. 

You know the feeling you get when someone says things like “the cat’s meow” – that is how antiquated our approach to understanding data privacy is. The daily newsletter you read, the publication you check religiously every morning – they have been driving the Metaverse data privacy conversation, albeit in a very outdated way. Their focus? How the Metaverse can track your eye movement, GPS location (hello, smartphones), record your voice – not like over 100 million people have an Alexa, or anything. This type of data collection may be an invasion of privacy, but it is an extremely well-regulated invasion of privacy governed by state, federal, and national laws. The real problem? Like Las Vegas, whatever you do in the Metaverse stays in the Metaverse – and can come back to haunt you. It may be the future, but the Metaverse returns itself to the wild west of the internet where internet companies in the U.S. couldn’t be held liable. In the Metaverse, the sentiment of data ownership is a paradox – no one owns your data, yet everyone does. Being decentralized, no one has the authority to prevent individual brands, coordinated nation states, unscrupulous individuals – virtually any unknown entities – from monitoring you; storing, selling, and monetizing data; or matching the data back to you through the Facebook login ID you used to enter the Metaverse. Only when you “cash out” of the Metaverse, likely through some sort of transaction, do these data points become restricted by law to be matched together. Remember those quasi data brokers that we spent 25 years eliminating? They’ve just found employment again!