SLStats.com Redux

Why is it necessary to cast such negative motivations onto the developer? I sincerely doubt he thought "hey, I want to mine all this data and invade people's privacy and have them freak out in the forums over some worthless date". The vast majority of developers just do not think or work like that - they think of ideas that might be fun to implement and features that will make their product interesting. I am sure Mark's intentions were not to create some "big brother project" - which is a bit much in the hyperbole department, don't you think? The NSA spying on all of our phonecalls is a big brother project. This little watch reporting who it sensed around it is hardly some big brother privacy invasion. A little perspective would do wonders.

As far as why he won't do what you are suggesting, have you asked him? Have you talked to him, or just flamed him in the forums? From what I read in the Answers forum, he is working quickly to implement privacy features. Instead of just bashing the guy and talking about ear-tagging and big brother and a joker with a script in some hysterical fashion, try talking to him and airing your concerns. People are so quick to jump to the worst possible conclusions about people and cast aspersions on them - it is really quite silly, especially if you've never even spoken to the person.

I have contacted Mark Barrett via IM, politely, in-world, and requested that he add my name and those of my two acknowledged alts to his opt-out list. I know at least two of my friends have also contacted him tonight to opt out. None of us have yet had a reply from him. I suspect his screen is covered in IM windows, no small percentage of which are far less polite than mine was.

This should be an OPT-IN service, not something one must opt out from to avoid being tracked by all his customers.

I fully agree with one earlier poster. If the information was only available to those who opt in to his service, and only listed others who were also opt-in customers, I'd have no problem with it being offered. I still would not be one of his customers, not even if he paid me by the hour.

As it stands, I most certainly do have a problem with his scanners firing off every 5 seconds and recording the presence of every person within 20 meters of the watch. Especially when that data is publicly reported as if you were a 'friend' of the stranger who happened to walk by you while wearing one of these contraptions.

I agree with you, Chris. I am sure the negative implications of his project didn't even occur to him. I politely suggested to him, via IM in-world, that he discontinue the scanning of unwilling bystanders and the reporting of information on a public site that people in no way consented to make public. If his customers want to be tracked like animals wearing radio tracking collars, that is their business. Data collected without my consent on where I go and whom I meet is not.

I'm unsure about the privacy issues so I won't waste anyone's time with my worthless two cents, but I would like to ask a question of those with enough understanding of the technology to answer it.

Before I heard anything about this, today I noticed that several times while I was in the club lag for me would suddenly spike enormously. I'm not even exaggerating with the word enormously. It was like for a moment I would freeze up and then even chatting would become difficult and it kept happening repeatedly. I started paying attention and I realized that four times in a row it happened when a specific person would teleport in. She was coming and going and crashing repeatedly herself and each time she would return so did my lag. At the time I made a comment that whatever was causing her to come and go and whatever was causing my brief moments of lag must be one and the same. She didn't hear me to agree or disagree because she crashed (or at least disapeared, I dont know as she's not on my friend list) again.

Now after hearing about this watch/site thing and checking it out out of curiosity I see that she in fact wears this watch.

So my question is, and please dont be too harsh in mocking me I'm one of those odd people who understands very little about how all this stuff works , are the two things connected or was it just coincidence?

This is getting really interesting. Lots of opinions and food for thought. As announced earlier this morning, opt-out is in the works, I'm adding everybody who's messaged me so far. And, over the course of the day that's about 8 people so far.

I wanna get the opt-out done, so I won't say too much right now, but consider the following:

You're not the customer whose data I'm "selling" (which I'm not doing in the first place). You're the content. Does that make sense? Possibly. Let's find out.

When the concept was new, I'm sure web sites were appalled what Yahoo! did to them. Copyright infringement all over the place.

Also, the way SLStats works is not set in stone; if you guys are saying "Oh my god, an hour with an escort and they're my friend?!" then that's a good point. And it should probably be addressed, either by changing the math for everyone (okay, 10 hours?), or perhaps it's a per-user setting. Maybe it's a percentage (e.g. at least 40% of your daily average online time).



I am ignoring nobody. If you sent me an IM to opt-out, you're already on the list, I'll post here once the site's updated.

Just bear with me another hour or so.


Thanks,

Mark

It's actually an excellent question, and one you certainly shouldn't be mocked for. The only one who can really answer that would be Mark. Certainly, if the object is using a sensor and sending data to a remote site frequently, that is going to have an impact - what kind of impact is the question. I suppose you could do some testing yourself and just monitor the performance with and without the watch - you may also want to ask Mark directly what the performance impact is, since they are his scripts.

Something I didn't really have time to comment on in my original post was about the relationship this issue has to the sense of 'community' that makes up what SL is.

First off, about privacy again.. With the opening of registration on the MG, you seriously just can not consider any information about in-game data (that is, data about your avatar and the world around it, not about the person controlling it) to be private as long as any other avatar can see it (with the exception being conversations between residents). Otherwise the only privacy you have is between yourself and your computer's video monitor. As said previously, if you want privacy, go read a book or something.

Opening the MG helps strengthen the community (especially internationally, and unfortunately, ALTernationally), but at the same time gives people a reason to want privacy, especially from people they perceive as sources of grief. The idea of 'privacy' as people want it implemented in SL has a direct negative impact on the strength of the community in-world. In a place where you can fence off your land from anyone or everyone you choose, already with private sims, the openness and freedom that make the world unique start to get divided up.

People want to be transparent out-of-world, even though the barrier between logged in and logged out is thinner than ever, and the information is already freely shared. But at the same time, more and more transparency is desired in-world. People don't want you to know where they are, see what their doing, much less come on the land to even have a chance to see. If residents ever get the ability to have a completely anonymous mode in-world, where no one can see anything about them or talk to them, I'd be pretty sad. At that point, SL wouldn't be SL anymore.

So anyway, here's to special things, while we have them. I always lose direction when I make posts longer than a paragraph.

Mark,
I must say, I love your work and useless stats . I don't think the math is wrong, I think you should make an option for each user to set their friend threshold. The auto-friends feature is cool, but you could probably aboid some conflict by calling it something else
--Jesse

A potential solution to this problem might be that other residents don't know your name until you introduce yourself to them -- like a step before friendship. Then nothing can log people's names in this drive-by fashion. This would need to be done by LL.

As the world is implemented now, it could be interpreted that it actively encourages people to do projects like Mark's in order to meet people, or whatever.

That's not entirely technologicaly feasable, and will only serve to make conversations more awkward, like the real world, which sucks for meeting people.

I am pleased to state that Mark did provide opt-out devices to myself and to all the individuals that I personally know that have requested them so far, and he was quite polite about doing so. I did not have to go to his store. I just sent him a polite IM, and he sent me the opt-out box. Thank you, Mark.

I can verify that he has done this for at least six accounts that belong to myself or to close friends of mine, and we all opted out. He wasn't very consistent on explaining what to do with the device. Some of thenm just got a new object dropped on them, while some, but not all, did get an IM explaining what to do with it and why. Regardless, the name did make it clear that its function was to get you opted out, and rezzing the box did provide sufficent instrictions for use. I didn't care for how he set up or phrased his three questions to ensure that you really wanted to opt out. but as far as I can tell it worked.

I have checked, and none of the accounts that I know for a fact that have opted out now show in his database at all. (So far as I know, we all opted out before being unfortunate enough to have encountered any of his sensors.)