Privacy issues with llSensor

I currently use llSensor in the Eduserv office in the Talis tower block on Cybrary City, the Eduserv MeetingPod and ArtsPlace SL to monitor how many avatars are visiting. I have done this up until now without giving visitors any indication that they are being logged in this way.

It struck me recently that this may not be acceptable from a privacy point of view (even though I suspect that this kind of tracking is commonplace throughout SL). Yes, I'm only tracking avatar names, but many people choose to make public the association between their avatar name and their real-life name, so in many cases I am effectively monitoring usage by identified individuals.

Obviously, I treat any information gathered in this way as being private. It is not disclosed anywhere. I do it primarily to monitor usage, but it is sometimes also useful to be able to follow up with people who have visited when I wasn't there.

Given my concerns, I could either:

• stop doing it! :-)
• add a CCTV (or similar) sign to the area in which I'm tracking usage
• switch to using some anonymised form of identifier (rather than name), e.g. an MD5 hash of the avatar name
• switch to an explicit tracking method (e.g. a visitor book of some kind)

I raised this issue on the AllianceSecondLife Google group and as a result of the responses have decided to experiment with a small 3-D padlock icon containing a notecard with a short privacy statement. This is what the result looks like.

This makes it reasonably clear to visitors what I'm doing and allows them either to complain or not return (or both!) if they so choose.

Lights!

Hmmm... OK, so the lighting still isn't working properly in ArtsPlace SL. It works fine on my work laptop, but not on my desktop machine at home. I assume it has something to do with how well spec'ed the video card is??

Anyway... I need to investigate further. For the time being, if you turn up at ArtsPlace after dark and you can't see well enough force the sun to 'noon' in your client.

Addendum: Thanks to advice received from the AllianceSecondLife Group I now realise that I needed to enable 'local lighting' in my SL client preferences. Doh!

Presenting in [Teen] Second Life

Global Kids have released a very useful PDF document describing various approaches to giving a presentation in Teen Second Life - though I assume that everything they say applies to Second Life as well.

The document covers six approaches to presenting, from the basic use of live video streams thru to highly-innovative 'physics-free presentations'.

It would be very nice if there was a companion technical how-to document, that covered the gory details of how to set up each of these approaches from a technical point of view. But as a general overview of available approaches this is a great start...

Imitating RL

I've noticed a tendency for creations in SL to mimic their RL counterparts. Obvious examples include people's avatars, which I suspect often are designed to be similar to the RL owner (albeit sometimes portraying a view of the owner thru rose-tinted spectacles). Clearly, I'm ignoring a significant leaning towards wings and furries by some residents which I presume aren't matched in RL!

Buildings also tend to take on a RL form more often than not. Why have a roof when it never rains, a bed when you never sleep or chairs when you never need to rest your legs? I guess these things make us feel more comfortable in some way? And, to a large extent, I designed ArtsPlace SL with a physical building very much in mind.

Similarly, many buildings tend to look as though they are constrained by the forces in RL - though there are significant exceptions. In my Eduserv role, I've just built a clear spherical meeting room that I call the MeetingPod, floating somewhere over CybraryCity. It doesn't need anything to hold it up, but the walls are helpful in preventing people falling off (though Silversprite Helsinki will know that there are some teething problems in that area).

On geography

It strikes me that the geography of SL can be quite disorientating. In RL we are used to geography being one of the things that defines what is and isn't possible - where you can easily get to on foot, and where you have to take a car, train or flight for example. In SL, everything is a search and a teleport away - co-location means relatively little.

While the teleport experience is quite liberating, it also means it is very difficult to get a sense of the overall layout of things.

I'm not complaining you understand. Just noting!

There are still occasions when I walk or fly somewhere - but often it is only because the teleport sub-system doesn't always seem to function 100% at the moment.

I'm partly thinking about this because I've built ArtsPlace SL on my own land, well away from its arguably more natural home on a sim like InfoIsland - and I'm wondering how much that matters. Clearly, there are issues with who your neighbors are in terms of what you look out over - but in terms of where you are, I'm not sure how important it is. At the moment I'm assuming that passing traffic is an irrelevance compared to getting good visibility is SL search engine results?

Welcome...

Hi, and welcome to the ArtsPlace SL blog. This is primarily where I'll post news and updates about ArtsPlace SL, my home in Second Life (SL), but I'll also use it to share my experiences of SL more generally.

Who am I? My name is Art Fossett and I've been a resident in SL for a couple of weeks. Not long... but long enough that I know I like it. And long enough the begin building stuff. Stuff like ArtsPlace SL, a space in SL intended to allow libraries, museums, archives and galleries to come together with artists and like-minded people in building innovative digital creations.

I've no idea how or whether this is going to work out... it may all come to nothing. But it seems to me that there is a potential in this pace for interesting things to happen.

In RL my name is Andy Powell. I work for Eduserv, a UK not-for-profit charity that works to support the effective use of ICT in education. I'm Head of Development for the Eduserv Foundation, a role that is largely about providing advice to the education community about the use of ICT and about providing some funding to support that where we can. In RL, I blog at eFoundations. To be honest, I'm not yet sure how my RL role and my ArtsPlace SL role are going to intersect.

Anyway, that's enough for now... I'll try and keep posting here regularly, as my experience of second life grows.