Open letter to the owner of slstats.com

they are your average player

anyone can goto their account page and hit the Volunteer link and sign up for it

here is the entire application for live help



soooooo....

in otherwords their awnsers are just as offical as joe dude or your best buddy

Quote ONE threat I've made. I'm not happy I've made that very clear and why. But quote a single threat.

How DARE you ignore all of us hating you! Who do you think you are! You don't have a right to ignore us! We can scream at you all we want, and you can't do ANYTHING about it and <<<MUTE>>>

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ROFLMAO - Live Help uses that for everything they can't deal with. LOL - that's hilarious.

except lindens specially watch the help, and will comment if 1) they are present or b) the live help agent gives bad advice

Since there was no intervention, I can only assume it was good advice

or no lindens were on watching it

Then they can get back to me

Assuming good advice until then.

You are hiding behind a traditional spam/script kidde hosting host, (Domains by Proxy) right?

This brings one question. Why?

Also that very company easily gives contact info when you phone them. So there is no point in privacy on the net!

You can't ignore legal battles, there would always be someone more pissed off/richer/etc than you, and that person would probably win vs you. There is no hiding.

My own suggestion? I personally feel your tool might have some merit (if you remove the current opt-in/opt-out situaton) but for now you need to take it down, fix it well then bring it back up. The way it works right now would just cause more distress.

So, there was an opt-out method?

Yes your honor.

Case dismissed.

Read my posts. I stated if I am not removed.

So, there was an opt out method?

Yes your honor.

And did you remove the plaintiffs information?

No your honor.

Alright, lets get to it.

Opt-opt is fine for those who bought the watches, but what about the innocent people who are being randomly scanned by the watches and force opt-in? They never wanted to be be on that website in the first place. They obviously do not want to even deal with prospect of opt-ing out of a no-name website with a contact info hosted on a script kiddy hosting network.

My question is, how many times do you click those spam e-mails right at the bottom where it says "opt-out".

Opting out is not the solution, the solution should be "OPT-IN". If you bought the watch, you have "Opt-in", do not automatically force it on other people around you.

I have those cards and the Grocery Stores have Seise and Desist (Spelling) letters from me and they do not keep my data. Also W-Hat is a Griefing group.

Clearly the only reasonable solution if you don't want people to "spyware" you is to buy a sim, set it so only you can enter, then sit in there alone and never leave, possibly while creating tin foil hats to protect your data.

And I would like to see a lawsuit on this very much, too bad video tapes wouldn't be allowed in court. It'd be hilarious to see someone try to make a criminal claim on gathering information that's already readily available in an avatar's profile, has no harmful uses, negative financial gain, and no illegal purposes neither by LL ToS or United States (and probably world) law.

Get over yourselves, nobody cares who you've walked past in a telehub or all the information that is already in your profile. It's useless stats placed up there for entertainment purposes. I can obtain much more about you just by standing next to you in SL, I can get, as said before, everything that was on the site, as well as all of the clothing and skin textures you're wearing, what you're saying, etc. And there's no opting out for that.

See, you're so worked up, you don't even read what I write. I said "I'm ignoring their legal threats."

I'm talking in general. Not just here. I'm getting a good number of instant messages. People are telling me on skype they've filed police reports, etc.

Sundays are the busiest, so should be interesting to see what tomorrow brings.

I have opted out from SLStats.com with every avatar that I have, and in at least one case, for this account, Mark assured me that my avatar had not yet appeared in his files, and that by opting out I would NEVER appear in his files. If I DO start showing up in his database after this, I will abuse report him for that. But I will give him the benefit of the doubt, for now.

I'll give you a case in point to consider, for how someone who is involuntarily reported on in SLStats.com could be harmed by being listed there.

Let's say your current or prospective real-world employer wants to check on your recreational activities. If all they know is your SL avatar name, then yes, they could get a free account and look up your profile. But that won't tell them misleading information about who you associate with. It pretty much just says what you put there. And if they don't bother to set up an account and learn a bit about SL, they won't even get that far. They might get info from these forums, but again, they have to join first, and the forums make no claims about who your 'friends' are. They would have to search and read a hecl of a lot of posts to form any opinion at all from the forums.

Now, add SLStats.com into the equation. Now your avatar name is on a publicly searchable database, and linked to a huge number of other names as 'people you associate with'. An internet search or similar web data mining can now access that publicly available website, and turn up the 'interesting' fact that your SL avatar associates with this list of specific, individual people.

Now your employer goes into SL, and starts looking up people on that list. Not just you, but all the people you supposedly associate with. They find virtual strippers, escorts, a professional dominatrix, Goreans, furries, cyber terrorists, hackers who have no respect for data privacy... Maybe you never ever talked to ANY of these people, but your employer now thinks these are the people you hang out with...

So you lose your job.

Paranoid? Perhaps. But I know people who lost jobs for less incriminating 'evidence' that an employer found on a website.

The information in your SL profile does not say who you associate with. It certainly does not say who you happen to walk by once in a while. The SLStats.com database, on the other hand, claims that these are people you meet with, even though that 'meeting' actually consisted of them walking within 20 Meters of you, on the other side of a wall.

I don't hire cyber-hookers or other virtual sex services in SL. Ever. But if someone wearing an SLStats.com watch walks within 20 meters of me when an SL sex worker also happens to be within 20 meters, and I haven't opted out, I'm listed on a public website right along with all her regular customers. No thanks.

If none of those thoughts worry you, then go wear one of those watches, and have fun. Myself, I want no part of it, and I think it is wrong for this to be an opt-out database.

As for the person who compared this to grocery store advantage cards, you're making a very bad analogy. Those cards and the stores that use them do not:
* Collect any data on you at all if you choose not to use the card for a particular purpose.
* Post their data on a publicly available website.
* Associate your name and social habits with other customers of the store, and claim that you have 'met' all of them.
* Claim that you not only buy groceries at that store, but that you also 'know' all the hookers in the brothel on the other side of the block, that you're completely unaware of.

At least with a grocery store advantage card, they actually give me something of value for participating in their data collection. SLStats.com does not compensate me at all for the involuntary use of my data.

http://www.telecomasia.net/telecomasia/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=360482







French blogger sues after getting fired Jul 25, 2006 [left]A 33-year-old British expat in Paris who writes under the pseudonym "La Petite Anglaise" and tells of love affairs, single motherhood and office bloopers, has filed a lawsuit against her employer after the company fired her, an Associated press report said.[/left]
[left] [/left]
[left]The Associated Press report said she kept her popular blog anonymous, never revealing her full name or workplace, but despite her attempts at secrecy, her employer found out and fired her, unusual in labor-protected France, where workers have strong legal protections.[/left]

[left]Now she's suing her employer in a case generating buzz on both sides of the English Channel, the report said.[/left]

[left]The lawsuit is seen as a test case in France, where there have been few cases of bloggers getting fired.[/left]

[left]The expat in Paris goes only by Catherine and declined to reveal her last name because of the personal tales she recounts on the site, http://www.petiteanglaise.com. She says she was careful never to reveal online the name of the British company she worked for as a bilingual secretary, the report said.[/left]

[left]Her employers, the accounting firm Dixon Wilson, cited "loss of trust" and said they felt she had damaged their reputation, Catherine said. Though her name was never used online, her photograph appeared in a French newspaper article about her blog, the report said.[/left]

I don't read eh? Do you read what you wrote? I can read plain english and you gotta really twist your word's to claim that reply to me didn't say I was threatening you. But you have persistently insulted me. tech ignorant, grieving, so worked up I'm not reading. You just don't stop, if someone doesn't agree with you you bash them.

Please if you would Mark, I would like to know the purpose of collecting all this data on random bystanders. Sure it could be a fun interesting and rewarding project for a social networking study in simulated worlds but that doesn't seem to be the purpose here.

What annoyed me is that i had to find u from the forums as u dont seem to know now to include your details in Search and then i had to find your store via your website to then have to go and opt out rather than is the norm opt in to your 3rd party website which im sure will develop into a fine data collection centre as u refine your data collection methods over the coming months

Worse still I see a Linden as good as giving ur site the official seal of approval for collecting data via an opt out method and yes when i give lindens permission to display my details on the web i mean on their site and i dont mean by a third party website that i have not subscribed to.

As far as the opt out system is concerned i wud stop trying to be a smart arse and keep it simple i dont want to have press several buttons to opt out of a company that can store my data and use it sometime in the future as SL changes and you have developed the advertising engine to go with all the data and site u have built up

Boy do u need a damm good PR u started on the wrong foot OPT IN - NOT - OPT OUT

Good Luck

Then what, pray tell, is the purpose?

Marketing?

How do you market "these people play SL" information?

That's not even accurate. I know Mark claims it's 20m but it's more. When I found out about the site there were 3 people listed as having seen me. 2 of them I know when and where they saw me. They never got within 20m of me. The closest was 23m the other was 30+. The 3rd person was so far away from me he was just flying through my home sim. And I only know that because he showed up on Berri's list also.

Ah, you are right of course, I had forgotten this. Been a while since I've been to small claims court, I can't even remember whether you can do as you suggest there.

In this case, I wonder if it wouldn't be worthwhile for you to try to get more attention on the matter, maybe a little press? Yes, I'm egging you on because I do not think you will win, but since the final ruling is not predetermined just think what happens if you do in fact win?

Social network sites (and those that facilitate and report on them) are gaining hugely in popularity and numbers. The utility , legality, and morality of this kind of thing is still being determined. I personally see tremendous positive potential in this area, and though I think SLStats is at this point not in any way a true threat to anyone's privacy, the emotional impact is for some people quite readily apparent.

SLStats is getting an overly large amount of attention, given that in the few short weeks I've been in SL I've seen much more real but less publicly visible invasions of my own privacy.

This is quite exciting, and I can hardly wait to see how it all turns out in the end.

P.S.: I gotta get me one of those watches.

I can, Takuan, as long as its under (I believe) 2000 USD.

No point to egging him on. This morning when I checked my details were removed but my name still appeared. Opt-Out names no longer appear at all. Either as an individual profile or in a list on someone else's profile.

Your guess is as good as mine at this point. It seems to me to be a hobby projcet to test the limitations of the technology and in doing so has drawn in a lot of collateral. But I would rather hear what it is from Mark than making guesses.