control Tag

Meta is launching new parental supervision tools for its Quest VR headset, along with new educational resources to help parents protect their children in a more immersive virtual environment.

The move comes as the acceptance of virtual reality continues to rise, and with reports already indicating that some users are being sexually harassed and even assaulted through their digital avatars, Meta must get ahead of these concerns before they have much more significant impacts.

Meta’s new parental control panel inside the Quest headset, which originally debuted in March, will allow parents to approve their children’s downloads and purchases, block specific apps that may be inappropriate, view children’s screen time headphones, monitor the connections of your children’s friends and more.

Teen users will need to initiate the parental link to their account, making sure they are aware of the process.

That could give parents more peace of mind, and with Meta anticipating that eventually more and more people will spend more and more time inside their VR environments, there certainly needs to be a level of protection for younger users (note: users must be over 13 to create a Quest account, which probably not all users meet, but that’s the minimum age threshold set by Meta)

In addition to this, Meta will also launch a new parent education hub for Meta Quest, which will include guides to its VR parent monitoring tools and other resources.

As Meta looks toward the metaverse and a more immersive take on online engagement, there are also significant safety concerns to be aware of for young users, especially given the harm we’re already seeing as a result of social media use. .
If teens are already experiencing mental shocks as a result of current online engagement, you can only imagine this will be much worse within completely closed virtual spaces, where it can seem like there is no escape.

The hope is that Meta gets ahead of himself before he becomes a bigger concern, something he didn’t do in his initial “move fast and break stuff” era. In fact, throughout its history, Meta has shown little concern for the impacts its apps may cause, until well after the fact (and after much outside criticism), which doesn’t inspire much confidence in its approach to the Metaverse. .

Will Meta incorporate the lessons it learned from the early stage of social networking and connecting online at a foundational level of its Metaverse?

Early updates like this are a positive sign that, along with voice controls and personal limits in VR, should help provide more protection.

But misuse of these more immersive environments will likely occur in ways we haven’t yet considered. And on that note, I hope Meta doesn’t move too quickly, or things could break even more than ever.

During the annual Google I/O 2022 event, among many other news, the company announced that at the end of this year it will launch the platform “My ad center(My Ad Central), an advertising hub that will give users more power over which ads they want to receive. According to the company, the tool will replace current ad personalization features and why you are seeing this ad.

This news reinforces and aligns perfectly with the growing market commitment to data privacy.

In this article, you will discover the main changes that will take place with this new product and you will learn how brands can prepare for this new reality.

So what will change for users?

Very intuitively, My Ad Center will allow any user to choose ads on the topics and companies they want (or not) to see when using YouTube, Search Network or Discovery.

Themes and brands will be presented as shown in the following image:

By clicking the +/- buttons, users will tell Google that they want to receive more or fewer ads on a certain topic or from a certain company.

Moreover, as you can see in the following image, the user can also block certain topics that he considers sensitive:

Another interesting option is the “privacy” in My Announcement Center. Here you can edit your demographics (age, gender, education level, etc.) as you see fit. This will give the user the power to receive advertisements based on the targeting they want.

In addition, when using the search engine or browsing Google partner sites, you will have the option to mark, block, filter topics and also find out who is sponsoring this link in Google Ads:

What will change for brands and advertisers?

If well accepted by users, the My Ad Center solution will further improve the quality of information and data intelligence on the Google platform.

At the same time, the user experience can be constantly improved, as this information will serve as the basis for personalizing and filtering the topics that really interest the user.

Google being the largest search engine in the world, offering a good user experience is not an optional strategy for the company, on the contrary, it will always be a priority in its changes.

Thus, with the launch of its hub, advertisers will have to worry more and more about the relevance of their advertisements.

Promoting a good user experience and achieving good segmentation in your campaigns will be crucial factors for success with this traffic capture channel.

In addition, the user will have the possibility to see “who paid for this ad”, an unprecedented possibility which further reinforces the importance of branding for businesses.

How can the brand prepare for it?

This shift reinforces the idea that brands are striving to be more and more relevant: if your business doesn’t have a strong relationship with your audience, they simply won’t put your brand in their ad preferences.

This will make it difficult for your ads to “just show up” to the public, as they will have the power to decide whether they want to see it or not.

And this is a very important point when talking about marketing strategies.

I’ve heard in many places professionals say that paid traffic is better than organic traffic, and that’s really worrying.

A marketing strategy should not be based solely on generating traffic, whether through paid media or not. Marketing is about relationships, positioning and authority, how content is a fundamental pillar.

A good content strategy has the power to generate relevance and build communities and legions of followers for your brand.

Therefore, ads will not only be a channel for acquiring customers, but also for connecting with your audience.

Do not see advertisements only as a means of “pushing” your offers towards the prospect, but as a channel of attraction and relationship with advertisements that are really relevant and have the power to capture the attraction of the user.

Additionally, the ability for users to choose the topics that interest them can be seen as an opportunity to further improve the targeting of your ads and target people who really want to receive offers related to the topics that, for them, are more interesting. pertinent.

We still cannot say what the real impacts will be for advertisers and users, however, my recommendation is that you update yourself on the trends and revolutions that the issue of “privacy” will continue to generate in the digital world and that you are getting more and more prepared for it.

conclusion

To strengthen its concern for issues related to data privacy, Google will take a very important step, and why not, bold, to improve the experience of its users on the Internet.

In this context, brands must move in the same direction to offer better experiences to their audience, improve their online positioning and attract people who really want to consume the content and offers offered by companies.

As I’ve said before, we still can’t say what the real impact of My Ad Center will be for businesses, but it’s of the utmost importance that brands start taking the issues more and more seriously. privacy on the Internet and to reinvent their marketing strategies. marketing.