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Meta , the company formally known as Facebook, wants to be the company of the metaverse. It is claimed that the metaverse is the next evolution of the Internet. A new parallel world. It is slightly unclear what this world is right now. The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has suggested it could mean creating a virtual “home” and rooms to meet and connect with friends. A place of virtual work meetings. A place to attend music concerts without the effort of leaving your sofa.  The first issue I have is the business model of Meta and the second is privacy. They are linked. The business model of Meta is that they make money via targeted advertising. Traditional advertising, of the non-targeted variety, is all about advertising with broad appeal. The advertiser knows very little about you. The Meta (Facebook) model is to know more about you than you might know about yourself.  After browsing the Internet to buy a new bed you might log onto Facebook and find you get adverts about beds.

Telegram, instant messaging client, has become much more to the fore in the last few weeks. Its popularity is driven by its use in Ukraine and Russia. This should surprise anyone. The creator of the Telegram app is Pavel Durov , a Russian who created their Facebook equivalent called VK. VK proved too much for Putin and Durov had to sell. He now runs Telegram from Dubai.  Telegram is regarded by its users as encrypted. However, by default, the encryption keys are held on Telegram servers allowing data to be read by Telegram staff, if they want to. The private chat feature, hidden in the menus, switches on end-to-end encryption. This keeps the encryption on devices and under the control of users. For this reason, privacy advocates advise the use of Signal, Matrix and other end to end encrypted chat apps. WhatsApp does use end to end encryption by default so, in theory, it is a better choice than Telegram. There is a different problem with WhatsApp. Facebook owns it, and it can harvest me