  The metaverse promises a host of bright opportunities for business,
economics, and society. Though, a number of critical aspects are still to be
considered and the analysis of their impact is almost non-existent. In this
paper, we provide several contributions. We start by analysing the foundations
of the metaverse, later we focus on the novel privacy and security issues
introduced by this new paradigm, and finally we broaden the scope of the
contribution highlighting some of the far-reaching yet logical implications of
the metaverse on a number of domains, not all of them in tech. Throughout the
paper, we also discuss possible research directions. We believe that the
provided holistic view on the foundations, technology, and issues related to
the metaverse-with a focus on security and privacy-, other than being an
interesting contribution on its own, could also pave the way for a few
multidisciplinary research avenues.
