Freedom of expression in privacy vs. public interest, a case for open justice in extended reality

Abstract

This paper continues the discussion on advanced jurisprudence, outlined in Algorithms, Ethics and Justice (Hadzi, 2022), where restorative justice was proposed for the mitigation of artificial intelligence (AI) crimes. Algorithms, Ethics and Justice proposed an alternative approach to the current legal system by looking into restorative justice for AI crimes, and how the ethics of care could be applied to AI technologies. The paper signifies an expanded version of Hadzi’s contribution to the Digital Research in Humanities and Art Conference (Hadzi, 2023), focusing on the notion of cyber offenses in extended reality (XR), given the rise of the metaverse (Anderson, Rainie, 2022; Chohan, 2022), and the future scenario of bio-metrical data of EEG capable headsets (Graham, 2022) being misused by rogue companies and/or criminals (Jaber, 2022; Nair et al., 2022; Zhao et al., 2022). The authors begin by questioning the cyberspace – including the emerging metaverse – as public sphere, i.e. a social space in which democracy is being enacted to explore open justice in extended realities (XR), and then by continuing the discussion around the right to be forgotten and the freedom of the press versus privacy, through a comparative analysis between the legal situation in the EU and that of the USA. The paper concludes by warning against excessive state control while attempting to project a desirable scenario of multiple digital public spheres.