Your Real-Life Personal Information

Oops! Wrong thread. I was just day-dreaming about update day and its beautification of the forums!

Thats twice! ...you make me spit something at my screen again and I will....do something that will piss off somebody.

Excellent!

This thread is Officially Dead!

zomglmaoroflol u postd my persinal inflo,,,, how did u now i was a 'you'?

zomglmaoroflol u postd a deth threet i hope threed abus riports u

high five!

I think that's a very valid point, Coco, but I'm not so sure I agree that using your personal information online (or some day in SL) is needless. What if you want to enter into a contract with another player involving large sums of money? What if you want to hire someone to do part of your business and it involves giving them the keys to your intellectual property? Are these things you'd feel comfortable doing with someone whose anonymity is held as sacred or would you feel more comfortable if there were genuine accountability? As it is now every business in Second Life would be considered "fly by night" in the real world. That might not be a problem now, but what about in the future when business being conducted in SL has much higher stakes? That's what I've been trying to get at, aside from trying to put the notion of privacy being necessary for safety into a rational perspective.

Today on the show we have the demented octopus rebutting further dry comentary by covert members of the FIC. (appologies ahead of time for revealing a specific species name, that's probably personal). How many pages WILL be added today!? stay tuned and find out!

We now resume beating ex-equus.

Jerry! Jerry! Jerry! Jerry! Jerry! Jerry! Jerry! Jerry! Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!

Yes, Chip, I don't have my original post in front of me right now, but I was bearing in mind throughout that people in the situations you describe, with online businesses and so forth, would of course put information on their pages. If you look at the post, you will see it is qualified in ways to encompass that.

And my interested has been perked by your mention in some other thread (I believe it was your mention) about the conflicts that could come when commerce gets more intermingled with the game, and there could become a real need to put your real life person to your ingame personna. That's a very interesting quandry, especially in an evolving game such as this, which will probably be the first online game to explore that tricky territory in any real sense.

Yes, accountability becomes an issue, and I agree, every business in Second Life is somewhat fly-by-night. E-bay often has that fly-by-night quality to it, too, though I have bought from there and don't feel in the least endangered; nor would I if I sold my rubber stamps there, either, lol.

I think what someone else said earlier in this thread is actually key to a lot of this: That in the e-bay case, for instance, BOTH parties know the information about the other. And both parties are essentially nobody special, with typically no ax to grind. Ditto with the repairman coming to your door example that person gave.

Whereas in the celebrity example, we all know Stephen King, but he doesn't know us. So at this other extreme, you have someone who runs a very high risk of attracting some unaccountable nutcase.

Within those extremes, I think, lies the world of online gaming. People often play them expressly to enjoy the anonymity of play with others, especially if they have some sort of celebrity or controversial aspect to their rl selves. Others just like to keep their play play and their real lives real lives, separate. Otherwise their play loses its play flavor.

We often do get to know online people irl, taking those risks as we see fit, and I, for one, am not paranoid about it. I have met maybe 60 friends from online irl. For me, the combination of my judgment and my information about them, juxtaposed against the very real risk I could be wrong and meeting an ax-murderer, is a risk I'm willing to take, depending on the individual in question, and is just the same sort of thing as in Talen's scuba diving example. (Only probably riskier, lol.) (I am choosy, though, lol, and take precautions always.) I value the friendships of these people, who are just real, ordinary everyday women and mothers like myself.

But like that person earlier said, in the game, it's not equal, and there is no way to check up on the other person (unlike the friends I meet from online). They may know all about you and where you live, but you can't find out about them. Everyone we play with is anonymous. So it is just not fair to have one person's real life info known, while that of the rest of us isn't. In fact, it's dangerous.

I knew a celebrity once who was in the phone book. Under her celebrity name. I know, I called her for an interview. Her agent said, "She's in the book." In New York, yet. It surprised me greatly. But it didn't shock me. Celebrities handle their various levels of fame in various ways. For some, they must have security. Or they discover a tad late they should have had more security. (David Letterman.) For others, they get along fine without so much separation from the real world.

But each gets to decide his level of security, for what that's worth (none of it is foolproof), and whether or not he wants to be in the phone book. And in large part, each even determines their level of celebrity. I feel far more sorry for those individuals who somehow make the news and didn't intend to. Life is often quite different for many of them afterwards, in ways they wouldn't have chosen for themselves.

So to sum up - GOD I'm rambling on today, and I still have another post to make here after this one - I'm in full agreement with you about the ramifications of doing business, whether here or in the real world. I think though, that's qualitatively different from the specific situation that engendered this discussion. There is no need and no benefit for any of us to know the real life particulars of another player if he doesn't want them known.

coco

Sadly, the Lindens have a strict privacy policy. They simply wont give us this information. Uh... unless you waive that right. You may want to consider going to the Linden Hotline with this message: "To resolve an ongoing forum debate, I am giving you permission to list all of my alternate accounts, and request that you do so now".

I don't see why the Lindens would refuse you.

Thread temporarily unDeaded!

Chip brings up an excellent point - one which I've communicated directly to LL on several occasion's due to the woefully inadequate TOS and implementation there of.

It is a serious issue and has been, IMO, since before Jan. of this year when my then business partner hid behind the "...protecting Merwan's privacy..." ruse regarding his hostile breach of our RL business contract binding our SLEx partnership. Sooner or later these very real issues will have to be addressed in a TOS that actually can deal with RL/SL business realities.

_/_/

Great post Coco. You make a lot of excellent points. It will be interesting to watch this issue evolve since I think it will be an ongoing one, outside the realm of just black and white issues of TOS violations. Will we end up with a world where in order to conduct a reputable business you have to forego your anonymity while everyone else around you keeps theirs? I think it's a really fascinating issue and I wonder when the academics will start tackling it in their discussions of online economies. It's a lot easier to come up with questions than with viable answers. I don't have any, hehe. Thanks for the food for thought

No one is ever going to get satisfaction out of LL on enforcing TOS issues when people would rather derail an otherwise helpful dialogue on the matter than support it and keep it in the forefront threads visible here.

Prof doesn't know when to keep his mouth shut.

The people who dislike Prof can't resist taking the chance to poke him.

The rest of us are just disgusted.

And so it goes... -shrug-

I couldn't agree more Merwan, and I think your case was the first of what will become many.

Edit: And a related thought I just had... if LL places themselves in the position of being the protectors of our anonymity, they will end up having to be in the business of dispute arbitration also... not an enviable place to be for sure.

And the other post I alluded to, for those of you trying to avoid housework (like I am) or otherwise trying to find something to waste time reading, lol.

I understand why some of you might think I am Prok's alt. I know he has a lot of them, but I think we all know most of them. And even on TSO, whenever I was surprised to discover one of the players was one of his alts, it didn't make much difference, as there was never any intention as far as I could discern to fool anyone as the primary reason for the alt. It was always pretty harmless.

Here is how I met him: In TSO, I generally liked to have my own places, ones I "owned" and ran. I worked on one in Interhogan for a long time. Then one day I decided to use my two other Sim spaces to go to two other cities and find someone I could live with there, just as a vacation, sort of, for fun, and without the responsibilities of running a lot.

I went to Jolly Pines and looked around, and found this eccentric, but very nice Gorilla. Before long, I somewhat charmed him into letting me live there with him, and I enjoyed living with him very much. Billy Buddy was his name. God, I loved that guy. (Platonically, of course.) Eventually, though, I moved out to make a place of my own in Jolly Pines, and I'm sorry to say, that kind of hurt his feelings, I think, but I had a new project I wanted to do and I couldn't do it at his house.

Meanwhile, I made a Sim in Alphaville and again looked around for eccentric, but very nice people. Interesting people. I found people like that, of course, by looking for places that seem interesting. (In SL, I look for events that seem interesting, like Jeopardy, Captions, discussion groups, fun stuff like that, and find neat new people that way.)

Naturally, as you can imagine, Prok's house - he was under a different name, of course - had an interesting look and title to it, so it was one of the places I visited. I liked him right away, prickly and all that he is, and he let me move in. He had a very nice roommate, too, who was the polar opposite of him, and apparently was played by a different person at least part of the time, lol.

Eventually, as in the other city, I moved out and made a place of my own - the Game Show Channel - very successful, very glitzy, very wonderful, very much fun for Sims and for us who lived there, twice a week every week for over a year.

I also took up for various causes politically in the game, such as that of the professor of the SL Herald, when he got banned from the Sims. Now that was a checkered story. Both for and against him, then for and against him, etc., depending on the issue at hand and our various viewpoints of it. And since Prok often commented on that blog, the professor and other regulars did the same thing then - "Oh look, it's one of his alts." But the professor and his staff can now vouch for the fact that I am a different person than Prok, although he TOO thought I was a Prok alt at first, basically because (a) I agreed with Prok on something - ANYTHING - and (b) I sometimes (ok, often, but not as often as today, in this thread) write too much. (I am a writer irl, and thus prone to such self-indulgence.)

Now all that is but a slim slice of my life in TSO. Prok is but one of many friends I have or have had on that game. I am not his equivalent, in any sense. We disagree on much. We have entirely different interests and many different friends. He is a friend of mine from TSO, it's just as simple as that. But when we do have convictions in common, it is not surprising that we should sound somewhat alike. I think you can all understand that. And I think none of us should be called upon to defend or explain our friendships to others as I keep having to do here; friendships are just impossible to explain or analyze. And I think it's ridiculous to assume that there aren't a great many people who agree with Prok on many things; if you think there aren't, you are fooling yourself.

If I agree with you on some issue - and I will! - does this mean I am you?

Now it was irritating as all get out to be told on SLH (AVH at the time) that I was just another voice of Prok's. Particularly since I disagree with him on just a whole lot. If you think about it, it is incredibly, almost intolerably insulting to be called the voice of ANYBODY, whether it is someone you like or not. Moreover, as a person of honor, I expect to be taken at my word about everything, a courtesy I extend to others unless or until I'm proven wrong. This is just basic, when it comes to me.

They would not take my word for it on AVH at the time, nor did they bother to go in game and really check into it to discover I was telling the truth. However, they did come to realize eventually, through IP checks or whatever, or just from getting the feel of things finally, that I was indeed a separate, living, thinking, feeling, breathing individual in my own right, capable of forming my own opinions on everything, including disagreeing or agreeing with Prok, depending on the issue at hand.

So I've already been through this once. And though I'm a patient person, I really expect all of you to be smart enough to realize that what I am saying is true, and even if you still suspect me, be honorable enough to give me the benefit of the doubt. Over time, you will discover that I am an honorable individual in my own right, and that I would never lie to you about anything. (In fact, I'm often too truthful, failing to realize till too late that discretion is a virtue.) The professor eventually determined that I am myself, cynical though he sometimes can be, so if you doubt me, ask him.

Or you can ask one of hundreds of people who know me in TSO. Or one of the dozen or so people in SL who knew me from TSO. Or one of the new players I'm bringing in here from TSO. Take your pick.

Meanwhile, please lay off this nonsense. Maybe you think it just hurts Prok, but it is also hurtful to me, because I AM someone else! In an effort to insult and diminish him, you are insulting and totally ERASING me, and believe me, I am very, very much my own person. Though I understand why you might have those suspicions, it is getting old now, and this is my statement that it is time to quit it. I hope I have convinced you. Be assured that when you hear from me, you are hearing from a very distinct individual, one with her own mind and her own convictions. It is not always easy to separate out one's true beliefs from one's personal loyalties and friendships (such as mine with Prok), but I make every effort to do so at all times,and I want you to approach me that way from now on.

In return, I promise never to write this much two posts in a row again.

coco

P.S. For me, this game is about me and my fun in it. Not about Prok, not about me and Prok. I hope this finishes the issue of my identity, so that I can continue to have fun.

Thanks, Coco.

You have crystalized for me exactly what has been disturbing me about the free-wheeling alt accusations. I've been irritated and bothered by the constant resort to them in an effort to diminish someone else and deflect the discussion into the weeds. But I've not had a clear handle on just /why/ I found it so bothersome.

Your point that the accusation in essence /erases/ the accused brought it together for me.

So, again, thanks.

Wow, Coco, I'm glad you came on and cleared all that up. I'd never live with a gorilla, sheesh. That was the best clue you came up with!

I'm trying to think how we could prove to the skeptical that we are two separate space-time entities. I can't think of anything off hand, now, but your writing long posts and agreeing with me isn't a symptom of alts, and I think now that you've put enough posts out there that really do sound different stylistically than me, maybe people will be convinced.

People don't have the tolerance for alts in this game that they did in TSO because they're snobs.

They want to use it more as a springboard and a resume-polisher for RL more, because of the money and opportunities involved, so they want to get all the credit/pluses/dwell, etc. on one account. I don't care about that so I think alts are fine. They are allowed. They are fun. They are needed for land groups given the hideously malicious features of the current land tools. They are actively encouraged by LL to be used to hold land groups, BTW. So honestly, get over the alt hatred. I'm not a person who uses alts for griefing, whatever Weedy Herbst says, nor for any malicious purpose, whatever some people who write on their profiles are claiming, to the effect that I put all the negs on them (great cover for lies, huh? Have lots of negrates you feel embarrassed about? Claim it's Prok and his alts --even if they haven't all been used -- and erase away those nagging neggers that show you up to be less than what you claim lol).

I think the proof that we are different and I can't influence you is your willingness to accept Nolan's apology. I didn't. And won't. It's fake. It's not real. And it's not how you deal with TOS offenses. TOS offenses should be examined, and enforced, and punished. Part of that process shouldn't be some silly fake reconciliation ritual.

~sighs, then admits it is time to put some serious drama queens on ignore~

I think submitting a post to the Linden Hotline granting them permission to list your alts (if any) would put your detractors in their place once and for all.

Hmm, seems Nolan is genuine in his apology to me, and maybe your right, Civil reconciliation is just a ritual and fake. It's better post boisterous and inflammatory statements and hang one's dirty laundry in public for all to hear, I guess.

Wow... this thread is still going on. As an impartial mediator, my recommendation is that all parties involved commit seppuku. Remember to wrap half of the blade in paper so you can get a better grip and leave your corpse with nice hands.

And, yes, I am an alt.

As an aside, I'd like to mention that gorillas would look really funny if they wore giant gloves.

Prokofy,

Could you clear up a matter of confusion for me please? When I spoke to you in world, you told me that your real life name had been posted by Nolan, and sat for hours in a thread visible to everyone. Was that in fact this thread? I have not found anyone to confirm that your name was actually posted.