Can Land owners listen into your IM's

Here is something interesting I was wondering about. Can Land owners (SIM Owners) listen into your IM's if they are on the property? I suspect they can record conservations (in channel 0) on there property if they have a bot there recording chat. But can they also set that up to listen into IMs?

Thanks, JulieAnne

No.

/thread

What about on the stand alone behind the firewall versions of SL?

As far as i know, LL is the only one that can read private IMS, other than the parties in it and anyone they are note carding and passing the info to

Open chat can be monitored, but according to the TOS it's not allowed to remotely monitor. There are various chat bug scanners on the market you can get, or if you are really concerned, file a ticket and ask a linden to check it out

~Brie

This does not exist yet. There are a small handful of companies beta testing it. They are not allowed to speak about it, under contract.

No guaranteed answers here, but most likely the answer would have to be yes. Your IM's have to go through a server, and there's the rub. Whoever owns the server can monitor traffic coming through it, whether it's legal or not. So while the average SL customer does not have access to the material going through LL's servers, if you're running your own server that's hosting a region, you may in fact potentially have access to this information.

I think that would qualify more as "server owners" instead of "land owners" though.

/me knows that Emerald has been doing something with IM encryption. Not sure how that works or plays into this...

I could swear that some can. I've had people reply to something I said that wasn't exactly 'in the air' and too quickly for anyone to have IMed it to them. One other possibility would be if that were the person's alt but I doubt it was.

I've heard that private IMs can sometimes get routed incorrectly - seen chat logs that are, supposedly, of a private IM ending up in a group chat. It could be something like that, I guess.

If you think somebody is listening in on your IMs on purpose rather than via some SL routing bug, I think your best bet is to break contact with them.

To answer your original question, which others have also done: no, absolutely not. LL provides no way for people to spy on others IMs. Not partners, land owners, estate managers, group owners, etc. Nothing.

Could that be a log where someone has enabled their own preferences to let IM show in chat? But I think in that case it would only be seen by their own viewer. They could still copy and paste the log as one piece, though.

No - LL allows no way for others to see your IMs. Anything with IMs going to various chat outputs (and I'm still pissed they totally took it out of the chat window) is totally within your viewer and shouldn't be visible to others.

That's not to say that there's not a bug/exploit where people can make it happen. I don't know of any but I guess there could be one.

Either way, if this person is being creepy/stalkery, it might be a good idea to move on. I just can't see any good reason for somebody to be getting at your IMs.

Yes that is what i was saying about combined local/IM chat logs too. It likely came from a viewer that has IM sent to local by their own preference. Usually for easier reading. But no one sees those but that person (until it's copied/pasted.)

No one's stalking me, that I know about. I have once or twice wondered how someone answered something I'd just asked someone else in IM but it doesn't worry me.

The newest GL Emerald has an Off-The Record Feature to keep IM convos Private. It is an option to install - it says it enscrypts the messages so only the involved can read them-

Always assume all electronic communications can and will be read by others.

except in a forum.

then it's usually MISread.

that was great.

This. All network communications can be hacked.

Some people are just fast thinkers and typers.

Others have macros or gestures that sound very conversational.

I used to wonder about this myself when I was doing WoW for a short while, and then the person I was suspicious of shared her macros with me - the equivalent of gestures - she just had a long list of 'canned answers' all bound to different keys, some of them very specific sounding, but like any good mind reader - she just knew how to apply them with finesse to make it seem as if she was in my head.

And if you own an entire region that is also being hosted on your own server, don't you fall into both categories, and are therefore a land owner who can monitor person-to-person IM's? That was the whole point of my answer. In those cases you bet the land owner can monitor your supposedly private communications.

As long as it is only on LL servers though, the general answer would be no, given the assumption that the question appears to only cover ways through a normal operating version of the SL client.