The gaps are logical. As evidenced by the internet, which despite so many years in operation, has not been able to find the desired legal stability. Scams, harassment, identity theft… the list is absurdly long and only seems to keep growing with time. Interpol does not want this history to repeat itself.
Criminals are sophisticated and professional
“Criminals are sophisticated and professional in adapting very quickly to any new technological tools that become available to commit crimes,” Interpol Secretary General Jurgen Stock reported. BBC . “We need to respond to that. Sometimes legislators, police and our societies are falling a bit behind.”
metaversal dilemmas
Does a falling tree make a noise if no one is there to hear it? This old questioning has never felt so current as now that we are at the gates of the metaverse. In this case it would be: if a crime did not happen in the real world, did it really happen? Not even the authorities know what to say about it.
Such is the case of Dr. Madan Oberoi, Interpol’s executive director of technology and innovation, who declared that in this new virtual world “there are crimes that I don’t know if they can still be called crimes or not. If you look at the definitions of these crimes in physical space and try to apply them in the metaverse, there’s a catch. We don’t know if we can call them a crime or not, but those threats are definitely there, so those issues have not been resolved yet.”
We don’t know if we can call them a crime or not, but those threats are definitely there, so those issues have not been resolved yet.
His doubts are due to the fact that the first metaversal explorations have not been rewarding for many. In fact, there are many who think that the digital world is turning out worse than ours, since users have taken advantage of the anonymity provided by their avatars to commit all kinds of atrocities. Hits, robberies, rapes… situations that we would never do on the physical level become more and more recurrent on the technological level.
The problem is that strange as it sounds, these attacks happen without happening. Almost like saying that killing a non-playable character in a video game should be seen as murder, but with the particularity that behind those attacked by the metaverse there are no simple algorithms, but people of flesh and blood who suffer with what happened.