Mark Zuckerberg often says that, when he started Facebook in a Harvard dorm room, he could not have predicted the impact the social network would ultimately have. It was therefore inevitable, in his telling, that some mistakes would be made. And made they certainly were.

The company’s push into “the metaverse,” as Zuckerberg is dubbing his particular vision for augmented and virtual reality worlds, is therefore an opportunity for a do-over. Building a new product from scratch should let him fix the mistakes of Facebook 1.0.

Back in 2004, Zuckerberg didn’t know his product would have the scale to sabotage democracy. Now he does.

With the do-over, of course, also comes a new name. Facebook Inc., the parent company for Instagram, WhatsApp, and the eponymous blue app, is no more. It will henceforth be known as Meta Platforms Inc., casting off the toxic shackles associated with the Facebook brand, its mishandling of extreme content, hate speech and disinformation, and reputation for playing fast and loose with users’ personal data.

Zuckerberg’s presentation on Thursday, where he unveiled his vision for the metaverse alongside the new name, was more Elon Musk than Steve Jobs. Where Jobs kept new product details under wraps until they were ready to be manufactured and sold, Musk is more inclined to show off ideas and innovations that he plans to one day realize. Zuck, too, seemed to be presenting more of a manifesto than an actual product.

But there were also hints that, for all the whizzbang presentation, this was still the same old Facebook. The most telling comment came from Vishal Shah, the company’s head of metaverse products, who said that businesses and creators will  “sell both digital and physical goods as well as experiences and services and they’ll be able to use ads to ensure the right customers find what they’ve created.”

So advertising will still be the business model. In the metaverse, that could be incredibly creepy. Right now, Facebook has incredible data about what attracts your attention: how long you dwell on that Instagram picture of a skimpily clad model, how many times you’ve tapped on ads for hair-loss treatment, whether you’re more likely to watch a video from the “The Daily Show” or OAN. If you’re wearing a virtual reality headset, Facebook Meta might literally be tracking your eyes to see what you’re looking at, or gauging your facial expressions in order to recreate them on your avatar. Just how much of that data will the company be recording and, most importantly, retaining? If you opt out, will they actually delete that data or just retain it in an anonymized form, as is the case with some companies today?

Last year, Facebook unveiled “responsible innovation principles” that included being “transparent about how and when data is collected, and used over time so that people are not surprised.” Nick Clegg, Meta’s head of public affairs and communications, addressed the issue on Thursday, saying that it will take so long to create the metaverse that regulators will have plenty of time to catch up. But the company still needs to earn its users’ trust.

That will become particularly important if Meta is going to be a success because of changes to the competitive landscape. For the first time, all five of the U.S. tech giants are going to be competing directly: Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Microsoft Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google are all developing augmented and virtual reality products.

And the wealthiest of those, Apple, has made user privacy and safety a key product differentiator. Right now, Facebook is making a play for Apple’s rich community of developers, promising better terms than those currently on offer from Apple and Google, which presumably means taking a lower cut of royalties in their respective app stores. But Apple has carved out a better reputation for user safety. Zuckerberg himself acknowledged this week that you need to emphasize these principles from the get-go.

For all of his talk of a single “metaverse,” the reality is more likely to be a series of competing metaverses, run on different software and hardware architectures. If it’s going to win the metaverse platform wars, Meta needs to change more than just its name.