Measures to stop being tracked in world

It IS possible - I've had someone I never met, IM me my map coordinates. Kind of freaky.

I'm sure it was someone's alt - but still.

I don't find the OP paranoid. I have heard of this happening enough times, to think that yes, there are ways to map someone without their consent or knowledge (and certainly without having checked 'map' on the friends list).

Greenlife Emerald Viewer at least used to be able to do it gridwide but I think now it can only do it sim wide because of serverside changes. Sim wide any viewer or any script can track you quite easily and any script or viewer can easily see your online/offline status gridwide and sim wide your motion status (crouching, walking, running, flying) and a bunch of other facts about you. Not sure the hack that they use to actually track you grid wide but it must be a doozy.

Wow - now to me, the people doing THAT are paranoid. (I can't think of a GOOD reason to do so...which must be why it's against the TOS.)

Motion status - sounds like a lovesick stalker type to me. But who really needs to know what another toon is doing? I Rx those people two aspirin and a dose of sunshine.

Correct, that's why I did say that if you happen to be on the same sim, your name on the list changes color, then it's just a matter of camming around the sim.

Actually it's not against the TOS in itself, using it to stalk people is. That's why the function still exists but if you catch someone using it to stalk them you can AR them. A good example of legitimate uses of being able to track whether an avatar is walking, sitting, flying, etc... is animation overriders that use that to determine which animation to use.

SI?

SI = Second Inventory, already discussed by others above. The function in it to find anyone on the grid, if they reply to an IM, has now been removed (whether by the SI folk themselves, or by LL server side changes, I don't know).

SI updates are usually mandatory, but I read in another forum that via a hack you can fool SI into thinking it is up to date, and hence use an older version. So if the functionality was crippled by SI then an older version may still have it.

Rock

I originally joined SL to set up a detective agency (and is the reason I chose this name). The Agency was very succesful (in SL terms) but eventually the work got so much that I had to let it go (very reluctantly), but the SL rewards for a time-based business can never justify it, as you cannot charge RL time rates in SL (I would be interested in hearing about other lines of work where RL time rates can be charged in SL).

I found that the reasons people came to SL detective agencies was pretty much the same as in RL. By far the biggest group of customers were people (the majority of which were women, or at least their avatar indicated that they were women) who believed that ther SL other half were cheating on them.

I would say that in well over 90% of these cases the suspicion was true, but I do remember one particular case where the frequent absences of the other half (he was coming in as an alt) was because he was building a surprise love nest for him and his girl, taking up a full sim, and incorporating all the features she had mused to him.

Other cases involved SL businesses, where one partner suspected that the other was milking contacts, using alts to snap up deals that should have gone to the partnership. There were quite a few of those.

Back then, we had all the tools necessary to do this work.

We could track anyone on the grid, and get their chat in real time, remotely (still can do that, but the tools are now illegal)
We could detect all the alts a player was using (still can do that)
We could discover all landholdings any player or their alts had (still can)
We could NOT intercept any IMs (still can't)
We could take snapshots of any player, in any sim, remotely

None of the above things were difficult, except the detection of alts, which takes experience as well as tools.

There are still plenty of detective agencies operating in SL. Give them a try. Give them the name of one of your alts and ask them if the target person has any alts? Ask them if the target person can be tracked anywhere, have the chat recorded, have remote pictures taken. You will be surprised.