Big Brother - Second Life

Quoted

“6.2 Linden Lab may observe and record your interaction within the Service, and may share aggregated and other general information (not including your personal information) with third parties.

You acknowledge and agree that Linden Lab, in its sole discretion, may track, record, observe or follow any and all of your interactions within the Service. Linden Lab may share general, demographic, or aggregated information with third parties about our user base and Service usage, but that information will not include or be linked to any personal information without your consent. “


This agreement is concerning. Although I don’t have anything of great interest to hide. I do not like having my privacy violated. When talking to others or sharing personal information, who would want a stranger standing there recording everything you ever say or do? I sure wouldn’t, so what exactly is the extent of the monitoring. I assume you literally record all text messages in general chat and in /tell / IM chats not to mention all actions. SL is fun, but I don’t think it is so fun that it is worth given up any privacy.

Not only that, you are giving this information to third parties. This is only one section of your agreement, but it is the most concerning.



Is there an encryption program I could use to encode all messages I send?

The changes to the Terms of Service included more explicit restrictions on how Linden Lab uses user-created content for promotional purposes, along with changes to address the access of 3rd party software such as Copybot, and the addition of terms to protect Linden Lab registered trademarks.

The clause you're referring to has been in the TOS for some time, and refers to the fact that our logs track things like chat, IM, transactions, and presence information. We use this information to resolve abuse complaints and help with support problems. Some of these logs, such as chat and IM, are kept temporarily.

We have on one occasion given a data sets to a researcher, but only in anonymized form, for a graduate thesis.

We have an ethics policy restricting academic research, and a group in SL called Researchers which we have asked people to activate when they are in world conducting their research. Because we are seeing more market researchers coming into Second Life, we are expanding the ethics policy to cover commercial researchers as well. You are within your rights to refuse to be part of any research in Second Life, as you are in RL. If you feel that someone is including you in a research study against your wishes, please let us know.