SL Voice Giving Your RL Location?

I wouldn't mind that

My personal concern is how sensitive SL's core protocol is to IP spoofing

Basic safety wish = something to hide?

You should do an AR on M Linden for RL disclosure.

Sorry that I didn't come back to this thread until now. We were on my land, not his land. I believe that I had my land's music stream on but the tv wasn't on at all. We were just sitting and talking. I do trust the guy I was talking to but when he could tell me about where I lived I just was shocked. I think we were in a personal chat and not in open voice chat.

I suppose one could write a Jira for a 'feature request' to hide the IP addrs, but there's nothing LL can do about it other than complain to Vivox. Offhand, I can't think of anything Vivox should do to change that ... *wanders off mumbling about header compression*

Living in a large city, I'm not particularly concerned about disclosure/safety. It's highly improbable that anyone could discern my actual address from the IP address. I'd be more concerned about having to share sensitive details of my real life information with, oh I don't know, a data mining company providing "age verification" services to a virtual world platform provider. Thank heavens nothing like that exists in SL.

Not that I wanna panic anyone further, but if you use email or you have ever given out an email address... you have prolly outed your location with the same accuracy as anyone would get with streaming media.

Try googling your own email address and check out the links of people who try to sell you "more information."

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I'm real near Disneyland in California; my IP typically tracks to Irvine, 20 minutes away from me but close in a 'big circle' sorta way. That circle would contain a coupla million people.

Lots of people on the grid know exactly who I am; the only reason it isn't totally public is that there are total jerks out there that would try to prank me with perhaps harmless intent, but with the actual result of *totally* scaring the crap out of my kids. No thanks, that's happened before and it won't again.

I got no results back from Google.

"Your search - [EDITED]@[EDITED].com - did not match any documents."

Usually sites like spokeo.com pick it up.

There's such a wealth of information we all put out every day, that it all starts to add up. It boggles my mind that "pet's name" or "first car" are security questions for passwords. "Pet's name" is one of the most frequently blogged about things you can easily find.

My email came back tied to my ISP, and I don't have a blog. What I suspect is going on, is that blogs I have frequented have tied my ISP to the post I made with my email present, and stored it. Then google search bots picked the data up from these files.

Interesting. I did that IP location thing once on myself and I showed up in two different places depending on what dynamic IP I was on. One was about 20 miles from me, the other was pretty generic for the big city I'm near. My SL email has not (so far) shown up in the wild except from some single spammer.

I think LL is going to get broken into one of these days and we'll all be up S*** Creek without a prim plywood paddle.

I haven't used the email account my ISP provides as anything but a spam trap since the early '90s. I have a bucket of GMail accounts for various purposes.

But that brings up another reason for keeping your IP address sub rosa: it can be cross-correlated with IP addresses collected elsewhere on the web. That'll identify you a lot more precisely than IP geotracking.

Streaming audio and video has always revealed your IP address... I've been warning people about that for years. I don't turn audio on unless I'm in a crowd, and I don't have Quicktime installed so I don't turn video on at all. I guess this is another reason to be glad I don't use voice.

having an ip address and having it looked up (e.g. through IANA, or local), doesn't harm much. Since most hostnames assigned to the ip address is only (if at all) telling which town/city/state one resides during that particular connection.

It doesn't tell the address, or any other information. It cannot be figured out, unless that party (who holds that IP address, gives it away him/herself through a service (e.g. website hosted on it, with contact info))
And who said that person lives there? maybe he/she was on a visit, using a public internet location (like a cafee) etc etc etc

Knowing the town/city/state is a too big area, to scan (fysically). And even then, you don't know for sure you have the right person infront of you.. (since people may not open the door, or tell you the info you need)

Only with a right paper (justice approvals), remote parties can gain access to the details of that person holding an IP address. Like address, age, etc etc
But only from the ISP's, under very strict conditions. A hacker won't be able too, since you need approvals of many departments, and you need to identify yourself too many times in the process..

I don't mind, that someone might fetch my IP address, and hostname thereof.
(if i visit a website, the owner of that site, knows it too, hence even if i sent out an email, one can see my ip address (through the headers).)

Combined with search tools online, and websites that track IP address for posts, and mailing lists that retain headers, it can tell quite a lot. People are routinely "outed" from anonymous wikipedia edits by this kind of cross-referencing. Now, I don't mind so much if someone figures out the guy who posted such-and-such message to a C++ mailing list also edited a page on the standard template library in Wikipedia, but I'd rather not make my SL identity quite as obvious.

It's very rare that I 'google' someone as I think it's generally a despicable act, but if there's a humanitarian cause (person may be gravely ill, or person obviously doesn't care / wants to be found, that kinda thing) then yeah... I may see if I can help as a "white hat" investigator/searcher.

And yeah, it's utterly possible. SL name + email + any other activity with email combined with real id can often nail an identity within maybe... four, five minutes; I've done it on rare occasion. Usually a total of five or six searches. Hey, I know, I'm slow and I very rarely do that kind of thing. The weird thing is, I've done it on supposedly "really tough cases" and I've often wondered: how could everyone else miss the ultra obvious? It's exactly like Argent says, especially with techies who have fingerprints all over the internet. But I just sat there biting my tongue and not saying anything.

More often though, people email me and their real name is attached somehow/somewhere. Not a big deal, it's not like I really need to know anyone's identity, and I certainly don't go passing it on. I can't think of a better way to be marked as an ass than to reveal things that are understood to be private.

Edit: Argent, I don't know how it works, it may be from blog ISP recordings, but gmail is no security. Search on desmondshang at gmail dot com and you should be able to pick up my southern california location with ease.

Given a IP address and nearly any other RL info, you can find someone if you know how and where to look..

About 10 years ago I was "internet famous" and that lead to a lot of problems.
So I scrubbed myself from the web. Until to all intents and purposes I vanished via most search methods.

Now even if you had my real name and city, it would be very difficult to find me.
I do a search every so often, and if I find myself I request the website remove me from their database. BTW in most cases if you send them a registered letter, and they are a US company they MUST remove you from their database.

Recently a good RL friend that of course does know my RL name and addresss tried to look me up for fun. They spent hours and could not find me. It does help that my name is not real unusual.

Using an IP address look-up, I'm apparently in Dundee, Scotland. Even if I actually lived there (and believe me, I'm nowhere near), I'd still take some finding among the ~150,000 population.

At least you 'get it.' Try telling that to most people and they will label you a paranoid.

Give real life information to Aristotle, or the PN (or other in-world griefing group)? Why do I have to choose... oh, right, I don't, I don't have to do either.