Can Somebody Hear My IM's?

OK it's happened to me like 3 times in the past week that I said something in IM to one person about another person, and soon afterwards, the second person reacted as if they had heard me. It made me paranoid that somehow they were listening, but that's not possible, right? So just now somebody told me (yeah I know) that there are tools out there to spy on somebody's IMs. Is this true? Surely (if you could prove it) it HAS to be against the TOS. But how could you prove it?

OK I found something on XStreetSL called Wishmaster, that allows you to cast 'Spells' and one of the spells, says 'SENSE - Allows the sorcerer to listen in on private channels to discover any hidden intentions. '

No, you can not spy on someone's IMs. The wishmaster is just listening for things said in spatial chat on a channel other than 0. If a person is responding to something you said to someone else in a private IM its because that other person passed on what you said.

There are tools that can spy on things said in open chat and pass them along to someone who is not present at the time but that will not spy on IMs.

I am 100% positive the person I was talking to did not repeat what I said. In fact, she said something to me about how weird it was that the other person seemed to be able to read our minds, because we were both saying the same thing. But this is a person I trust implicitly.

The person who told me that such a gadget exists told me that she got fired from a club she used to work at because she was badmouthing the owner in IM. I realize this is anecdotal, but I just want to make sure this is not happening.

There is no channel you can monitor that IM's are sent on, that I'm aware of. However I have not delved into the code for the client to see just how they are doing this. It is, however, possible that a modified client could send your IM's to any chosen location specified in the client. I trust you are using the regular client. I can't think of any other way for them to know though, other than being able to do packet sniffing on some IP address your communications are going through.

The most likely scenario in my mind is that avatar B and avatar C are the same person. Or they know each other and are passing info back and forth and having a good laugh, or even sitting in the same room in RL and watching each other's screens.

I don't mean to add to any feelings of paranoia you may be experiencing, but seriously this would explain a lot.

i've never seen anything like this tool for IM..i've looked myself just to make sure someone wasn't able to use something like this on me since they had used spybots on chats before on me when in club meetings with managers and things of that nature..

i have had quite a few people that i trusted completely slip to gossip and pass IM's of whole meetings to someone..only to see them pop up in group notices edited and distorted..
not that i hope there is such a tool but sometimes i wish there were just so i didn't lose a few friends over things..

I am 100% positive this is not the case. The person with whom I was IMing is a trusted friend (with whom I have had RL contact for months) and my employer. I'm the club manager and we were gossiping about one of our dancers, a person who I know lives in a different country on a different continent than my employer. It wasn't even anything malicious, just goofing around. Seriously, this is NOT what happened. At this point I'm willing to believe it was just a weird coincidence. I just got paranoid when somebody (a completely separate person, who ALSO lives in a third separate country, BTW) said that this gadget exists, or so she had heard. She's never seen one and we have no concrete evidence that it actually does exist.

i had something similar happen last year....once i removed all of my attachments and replaced my radar, it ended. so it appeared to be something that someone attached to me, like some sort of bug.

I don't think there is any way to have anyone listen in on anyone's IMs. Having said that, there are objects that can listen on "private channels" which is different from IMs which are used by scripts to communicate commands. Examples of these would be things like typing in "/99stop", to stop dancing from a dance ball or "/9 orbit Joshooah Lovenkraft" when used in a weapon and are sending messages on channels 99 and 9 respectively. Scripts can listen in on these private channels for the command and you can set devices to listen on certain channels from -2147483648 through 2147483647. So for instance, I could set my Mysti-tool to listen in on channel 501, which just happens to be the channel for Xcite products and can see the commands being sent even though you wouldn't be able to in regular chat as that is channel 0 They could have been listening in on these private channels and deduced what you were talking about perhaps?

Sre one or both of you using the Restrained life or Cool viewer? If you both are using the official LL® SL viewer than it is not possible for anyone to spy on your IMs.

So are you saying you can listen in on private IMs between avatars using the Restrained Life or Cool Viewers????!!

Over the past several years, I've run into "yard sales" that sell devices that supposedly spy on others' IMs. A few have been discussed in these forums. No one has ever been able to confirm that one of these devices actually works.

Just because they say that doesn't make it true. I'd wager two people were working to pull your leg.

I was in a club the other night were one person was using an item to fake emotes from other people in the club. It got extremely annoying, and in the end they starting making emotes with my name having me emote that it was me doing it...
- No one was mad, but what really got on my nerves is people started IMing me asking where to get the device, and not believing me when I said it wasn't me.

Point: people play juvenile games and grief each other.

A very liked person in my favorite clubs got banned from it this morning by one of the employees for harassing other patrons yesterday - at a time when she was actually offline...
- Sadly the employee believed 'some guy who IM'd the owner last night' over both the word of that regular club member -and- the full cast of regulars there this morning - most of whom where there last night as well. And in her state of upset frustration, the banned regular put the employee on ignore before getting banned...
- her reaction makes it unlikely she will get unbanned, but the entire thing seems to have been caused by some random third party griefer just looking to mess with us.

I have personally witnessed IMs being received by the wrong parties, on many occasions. Sometimes the system just sends them to the wrong place. The last time I saw this happen was almost a year ago, though.

It is possible that there is some bug that has been exploited so that you can actually make the IMs show up somewhere else, on purpose. (The ones I saw were being misdirected to seemingly completely random individuals.)

Another explanation suggested by someone above is that some third-party versions of the Viewer will allow your IMs to be monitored or something. That is technically very possible; I have no idea if this has been done. (This is the sort of thing that could be put into any third-party Viewer without users being aware of it. Remember, the Viewer can do anything at all in response to your inputs. Could be selectively relaying information to a third party, absolutely!)

Another idea is that you can buy a device in-world that will listen to other people's IMs. I don't think so. (It is possible to make a bugging device to listen to someone's open Chat, even though they are nowhere near you. It is also possible to make a device to listen to non-channel-zero Chat, but those are not the same thing as IMs at all. But I don't believe it is possible to make a scripted device that all by itself has the ability to listen to IMs.)

Another explanation is that the other avatars, whom you believe to be separate people, are really just the same person logged in more than once as an alt. Or that despite your strong belief that they are not two people in kahootz with each other, they are. Those would be my assumptions, and they are the most likely explanations by far, until someone can prove that there is something else going on. Unless you are physically standing over the people IRL while it is happenning, and can see what they are doing, you really just have their word for it. And they probably think it's really funny that you actually believe them when they say they are not tricking you.

PS. I am speaking from experience about that last, although the incident occurred more than 30 years ago. They had me going!

This. On at least two occasions I have received IMs sent by a friend of someone who I am also a friend of. They were not intended for me or my friend, but somehow they got routed to me. When I've replied, the 'sender' has been rather stunned that I've received the message, because they clearly sent it to somebody else entirely. I assume it's just some weird glitch that happens via the friends list thing (as I said, there was a vague connection: my friend's friend was the initiator of the message, but they are not *my* friend). They were just random, everyday things; so nobody was trying to cause trouble by repeating gossip or suchlike.

And this is just one among a whole laundry list of reasons why I do not get in the habit of badmouthing people, particularly behind their backs. It's just bad karma all around.

That could very well be that the person just typed into the wrong window (most likely). Or there could have been a bug in the Viewer that under certain circumstances caused it to send it to the wrong IM tab. But the bug I was seeing had complete strangers getting some of other people's IMs, and was probably a server bug. (I'm guessing some kind of mis-computed/cached identifier resource. But I don't know anything about either the Viewer or Server code and am wildly speculating.)

I have also occasionally seen the contents of my IM tabs show up on my avatar's clothing, but I am 99.9% certain that I was the only one who could see that!

unless they were a secret Linden....LL can see all IM's...

The moral being: Always badmouth people in public.

Pep (I much prefer to be nice about people behind their back. )

The person whose IM I received was not a friend of mine, and we'd never had any contact prior to that. He was a friend of someone *else* on my friends list; that was all we had in common. So unless he opened my profile and hit the 'Send IM' button and *then* started typing, there would be no reason for him to be typing in the wrong window. I was, as you said in your example, a complete stranger to him; our only connection being another person we both had on our friends lists.

My apologies; I didn't make that clear enough in my original reply.

There's some confusing information in this thread so I just want to reiterate that there is no known way to listen to someone elses IMs.

The comments about alternate viewers were simply indicating that if YOU use one of these alternate viewers than your IMs could be sent anywhere. Who knows. Some of them are even programmed to send your IMs to other people deliberately. I suppose the Restrained Life viewer has a feature like that.

The bugs that people are referring to are either a case of the IM being typed into the wrong window or IMs being sent to utterly random receipients and, as mentioned, that bug hasn't been seen in a year. Besides, the chances of it luckily picking your dancer instead of your boss are minuscule.

I'm gonna say either the dancer did not know what you said and you just assumed she did or more likely your very close friend on a totally separate continent who you trust utterly just passed the comment on to the offended party and lied to you about it.

Long live SL paranoia

Never be 100% positive about anyone or anything in Second Life. You can get burned easily by people you think you trust. Some people are not who they say they are.

So the 'chat spys' that say they listen to IM's, really only listen to open chat? I have seen them in gadget stores and they do state they listen to IM's.