Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has plans to rebrand his company with a new name so as to focus on building the metaverse.

Zuckerberg will unveil the company's new name on October 28th, at the Annual Connect Conference. 

Facebook has long had ambitions to be more than a social media company. To this end, it plans to recruit 10,000 jobs in Europe within the next 5 years to focus on building the metaverse. 

In July, Zuckerberg had said that Facebook's future lies in the virtual project, where users can lead second lives, basically working, living, and playing inside.

Such ambitions by Facebook have privacy implications, as worries grow over the company's track record in terms of privacy, and its negative impact on society and politics. Its recent venture into AR (Augmented Reality) glasses has already raised concerns over the ability to secretly monitor and record the lives of people in public or within their households. 

The metaverse in brief

The metaverse, according to Facebook, is "a set of virtual spaces where you can create and explore with other people who aren’t in the same physical space as you."

The company has been experimenting with VR for some time now with Horizon Workrooms and its VR headgear the Oculus Quest 2, but many founders are worried about using it, considering the giant's privacy track record.

The second problem this creates is that such novelties can serve as mere distractions because they can't replicate the tangible aspect of real-life in-person collaboration that a workplace needs.

Some skeptics fear that this whole metaverse debacle is a way for Facebook to distract the world from its many problems.

Given the company's track record in breaching privacy and circumventing laws, the concerns can be understood due to the capacity of this technology to turn people into walking surveillance machines.