LL Wants To Violate Your Privacy
Crime, Law, Linden Labs, Stupidity
Imagine going to the Second Life web site and creating a new account. During the signup process, you’re asked if you’d like to find friends from RL that are in SL. Sounds a little harmless if you just ask that question, so suppose that you decide to take advantage of the new feature and you’re sent to a page that asks you to enter your username and passwords for various email services.
Just to show that I’m not making this crap up, check this out, too.
Wait!! Linden Lab wants your username and password for these other services? This is just like those “find your friends” pages on sites like MySpace and FaceBook. Please tell me that you’ve never entered that information on those sites. You did realize that they’re on “non-secure” pages… right!! Not only is it a stupid idea to enter that kind of information, when asked for it, but owners of sites that ask that kind of information, in my opinion, are being highly irresponsible.
Anyway, let’s pretend that you enter this information, anyway. When you do, it imports all of the addresses that you have in your address books at these various services. All of you GMail contacts, Yahoo contacts, and Hotmail contacts are sucked over to Second Life. Your boss, your parents, Aunt Betty and Uncle Phil… everybody else that you’ve sent or received mail from are matched to a database to see if a Second Life user had used that email to sign up.
Just imagine the surprise of the “once anonymous” users of SL. Who is your boss in Second Life? What do your parents do in SL? Your Aunt Betty and Uncle Phil own “what” island? Whoa!!
It’s not actually a “plan” to do this, and I seriously hope that it never becomes one. This is being called just a thought about something that might be able to get better retention. If you sign up and know somebody in-world, you’ll be more likely to stick around. Makes sense, but this is definitely NOT the way to do it.
If they really want people to “stick around”, why not just improve the platform, so that users don’t crash four times every damn hour. Fix it so that you can actually “see” the graphics. Fix all of the other technical and social problems of Second Life, and people might actually hang out for a while, Linden Lab.
Malignant Narcissist @ February 13, 2008
Nobody said how they will do it and I did not say that. I just was curious on how they wanted to do it. It might be good if you would state in the first paragraph already that it’s there is just a general idea to make such a thing happen and everything is far from an implementation esp. in such a way.
Of course you are right when you say that people shouldn’t do such things.
BTW, I think it’s not just crashing, it’s really not knowing what to do after you signed up and did OI. Then a friend might be very helpful.
This might have legs on the Teen Grid but never on the main grid. Take a look at 100 random profiles of Second Life users and it’s obvious that they are NOT interested in revealing ANY real life information about themselves.
Compare those results with those from other socially oriented sites and virtual worlds and the difference is stunning. Why are SL users so protective of their real life identities and lives?
A relatively safe guess would be that many are doing things in SL that they wouldn’t want ANYONE to know about. After all, Second Life has more animated genitals, multi position sexbeds and perversion poseballs than all other virtual worlds combined.
Actually, with the exception of ‘Red Light Zone’ no other virtual world or MMO has such a obsession with sex. Perhaps those worlds can attract customers through quality service and genuine entertainment?
yes i hate second life to bunch of assholes they abuse people accounts they should be shut down by other company’s one day they will fall and they grounds will be shacking.
and by the way second life is still no Privacy they still watching bunch of assholes.you got no Privacy in SL because they can find any one is in the world first of all they see every maybe ip in your computer and know where you live if you open and download the software and you login you open the doors to people to see you and what you doing.