I am Art

This is me (see right) and this is part of my profile information, now being displayed on a Second Life Web page that is new, as far as I know.

I've known for a while that an avatar's profile image is available on the Web - in fact I display that image as part of the Second Friends Facebook application. But I'd not found this other profile information on the Web before, so I'm guessing that it's new.

Interesting... I don't object to my profile being made visible in this way. But I do wonder what the privacy issues are, if any?

The information has always been available in-world of course but surfacing it on the Web brings new issues with it. Issues around persistence of the information for example - what happens when the Internet Archive start storing this stuff (they haven't, yet!).

This stuff seems to have been rolled out as part of the new, Google-based, search engine that comes with release candidate 1.18.5. See the blog entry and commentary for some of the discussion. However, I found it using this unofficial Web-based search, Nothing official to see here, which is presumably based on the new engine?

The Awful New Search from Second Thoughts gives a nice overview of some of the issues.

Finally, hats off and a big thank you to Mal Burns for a non-stop Twitter stream that seems to pick up everything about everything to do with Second Life.

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.