Meta – the company formerly known as Facebook – has gone all in on the metaverse and judging from this past week’s press conference where Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg showcased his latest and greatest, it looks like this time, it might just have legs. Pun intended, of course, for those of us who remember his past iteration of the space and the legless floating torsos.

Now he’s back, like a bad penny, and in case you missed it, here is Everything Revealed in 10 Minutes, including “the launch of 28 chatbots (conversational agents), which supposedly have their own personalities and have been specially designed for younger users. These include Victor, a so-called triathlete who can motivate “you to be your best self”, and Sally, the “free-spirited friend who’ll tell you when to take a deep breath,” France24 reported.

“Meta sees these as “fun” artificial intelligence,” the piece continues. “Others…feel that this latest technological development could mark the first step towards creating “the most dangerous artefacts in human history”, to quote from American philosopher Daniel C. Dennett’s essay about “counterfeit people.”

“There is also a risk that chatbots with personalities could go awry. One of the conversational agents that Meta tested expressed “misogynistic” opinions, according to the Wall Street Journal, ” said Engadget. (Meta’s plan to attract young users hinges on cringe-worthy AI chatbots)…”There’s also a bot called “Alvin the Alien” that reportedly pries users for personal information … One employee noted…that users “might fear this character” as it seems like it’s “purposefully designed to collect personal information.” The company has been famously squeaky-clean regarding privacy violations in the past, so this should cause no concern.”

Hardly, as the two links above note (Meta faces a $100,000 daily fine if it doesn’t fix privacy issues in Norway and Meta hit with $1.3 billion fine over Facebook’s EU-US data transfers, respectively). And never mind that Facebook has long been notoriously harmful for kids, purposely manipulating them as whistleblower Frances Haugen told Congress and as we reported back in 2021 (Facebook’s Terrible, Horrible, Very Bad Day).

Meta is clearly targeting kids and as Zuckerberg said during a conference call in 2021, the company would retool its “teams to make serving young adults their North Star rather than optimizing for the larger number of older people,” Engadget noted, hoping to steal back those valuable eyeballs – and advertiser dollars – that Tiktok easily managed to appropriate from the platform.

And if you once again shrug your shoulders that Meta et al already know everything about you that there is to know, Meta’s new foray into the metaverse et al takes this to another level – exponentially – especially with their new metaverse-enable Ray Ban sunglasses which, as Futurism put it, FACEBOOK PROUD OF NEW GLASSES THAT LET YOU RECORD PEOPLE WITHOUT THEM KNOWING: SPYING JUST GOT EASIER.

Still think privacy issues aren’t at stake here and talk about intrusive! What if one is walking down the street in Meta  Ray Bans and people not even on the platform happen to be caught – and captured, metaphorically – in the frames. Facial recognition is alive and well and improving exponentially, so this takes privacy concerns into a whole new dimension, pun intended.

“The glasses are supposed to light up when they’re recording, and unlike when this feature was used in its dud predecessor, it now flashes on and off to make the effect more noticeable,” said Futurism.

“Yes, the pattern was more noticeable in person,” Victoria Song wrote at The Verge in her hands-on test of the glasses, “…but I was also indoors, and direct sunlight has the tendency to wash out any kind of LED or screen.”

The indicator light, in fact, has already been hilariously foiled by whoa-dude podcaster Joe Rogan, who in an interview with Zuckerberg last year smartly asked, umm, “couldn’t you just put a piece of tape over the light?”

“I guess in theory,” was all Zuckerberg could stammer in defense.”

Meta’s revelations at its presser left no doubt that the company is more dangerous by leaps and bounds than it ever was before. Meta’s metaverse now not only has legs: the company is coming back heavily armed. Onward and forward.