Did You Know That Your Video Gaming Avatar is a Privacy-Preserving Technology?
By Pat Easton Thomas
Like a lot of other folks, I have been an intermittent video gamer over the years. Either with my kids or with long time friends. In lots of games like Minecraft and Fortnite you have tons of avatar options. Until just recently, I always thought of this merely in terms of the fun and entertainment value. But a recent news story by Jim McManus in The New Stack made me realize for the first time that my avatar – and everyone else’s avatar – is actually a privacy enhancing technology. Privacy technology is about more than tokenization, data hashing, data masking and homomorphic encryption!
McManus wrote: “I talked with jin (@dankvr) one of the first members of The Open Metaverse Interoperability Group (OMI), which is focused on “bridging virtual worlds by designing and promoting protocols for identity, social graphs, inventory, and more.” Jin is pseudonymous, meaning that he hasn’t revealed his real identity online. This, it turns out, is an important characteristic of the open metaverse. “Pseudonymous work will be big in the virtual economy, avatars are inherently a privacy-preserving technology…’ said Jin.“
This according to a 14 June 2022 article by Jim McManus in The New Stack, you can read the whole article here.