I was talking last night with someone about cell phones, which led to a discussion of the Google Android operating system for mobile, which led to me giving one of my pointless rants about how Google is sucking up information when we browse, when we e-mail, and who knows, maybe with Google voice they’re going to AdWord my phone calls. He gave me the usual response, the one I just don’t understand: “It’s too late, we’ll never close that door, get used to it….everything that can be known about you will be known” and he gave me a sort of satisfied smirk that I associate with young’uns or coders (in this case, he was both).
I don’t quite understand the kind of global lack of concern over privacy issues. We’re increasingly living in a surveillance society. Data is being collected about us and we don’t even know it’s happening. And whenever I bring this topic up, I get the same kind of comment as above – Vint Falkenothers have replied on this blog that they don’t feel like these giant data streams about us are necessarily a BAD thing, because it means that information can be tailored to us, coupons or shopping points targeted, whatever – the idea was that if you give someone else the power of data, we get some kind of customized window on the world in return.
The problem is, that same technology that can give us a “we recommend” thing on Amazon can also give an insurance company a “we don’t recommend” thing when they suck out the fact that you have HIV or cancer or depression based on your browsing habits or filling out some form somewhere online.
Now, it’s not to say that there aren’t counter-measures. There’s the old “on the Internet no one knows your a dog” saying – except that they DO know you’re a dog, because most people don’t use anonymizers, or proxy servers, or clear the cookies in their cache or all the other things you’re supposed to do to keep a clean data trail – and do you REALLY trust that “safe browsing” thing in Google chrome? Sure, your mother may not be able to check your browsing history but it’s not mom I’m worried about, it’s Google.
The Avatar as Repository
In any case, against this backdrop you have avatars. And my point of reference for this is MMOs like Warcraft, say, but in particular Second Life. And Second Life has two things in particular that I think make it a game-changer: it has an economy with some modicum of protection for IP (and, more important, it has perms); and it has anonymity, although I’ll be the first to admit that I place a perhaps unwarranted faith that Linden Lab isn’t connecting our avatar profiles across to some vast consumer database somewhere, linking our in-world purchases to our Visa card or something.
But it’s the concept of the avatar as a repository of data that I find appealing, because with an avatar we have a proxy for managing the information that we display about ourselves, the connections we make, and the data we collect.
It may be clunky, it may be awkward, inventory and friends lists may be a mess, but the avatar provides the potential to gain some level of control to how we present ourselves, what information we make public, and how we’re perceived.
So when I rant and rave about Second Life it tends to be about those two topics: one, don’t switch around the perm system without major strategic thought (and couple the strategy about IP with policy and enforcement); and two, treat the user’s control of the data that is attached to an avatar as a key strategic asset and build tools and technology from THAT basis rather than from a “platform usability” perspective.
My secondary rant, I suppose, is to push back against cultural pressure to link real world with avatar identity. This has come up every now and then on Metanomics, or it has for me anyways – I remember when I was asked to appear on the show a year ago or whatever it was whether I wanted to use my RL name, and the regret I felt that in doing so that I’d be giving up some control over the benefits of a controlled identity portfolio – namely, my avatar.
The topic comes up every now and then – recently, New World Notes asked whether people like Scope Cleaver put themselves at a disadvantage in winning business because they wouldn’t reveal their real identities. I understand the question, but I also find it insulting and feel that it exerts a cultural pressure to life the “avatar veil”.
Identity Interoperability and Walled Gardens
Look, maybe I’m fighting a losing battle here. For an ever-larger percentage of Residents, Second Life is now ‘interoperable’ with the Twitter accounts, or LinkedIn, or their Facebook profiles. Sure, lots of people keep a sort of contained “Second Island” of identity – using their avatar name as an identity proxy across all kinds of platforms. But this starts to bleed over, at some point, into the same issues of identity management – either your avatar information connects to your real life information, or the avatar information itself starts to become difficult to manage.
I was fascinated to see a post about MMOs and an argument that identity interoperability should be an increasing feature of games:
“Here’s the dilemma: By spending the first few hours in the MMO adding people to a friends list, you’re missing out on crucial launch day gaming. But by immediately jumping into the MMO, you’re forced to initially play by yourself and put your hard-earned reputation as a reliable guild master on the line. Had both MMOs instituted some kind of social networking interoperability, this situation would’ve never surfaced.
Playing in an MMO or inhabiting a virtual world can sometimes feel like an isolated and very private experience without the company of friends. By creating a universal platform or unifying friends lists into easily transferable data, each end user will find greater value in the social online experience, potentially leading to an increased number of hours logged each session. Word of mouth could also spread faster, but that’s both good and bad for developers and publishers.”
Metaplace already does this, to a degree, allowing you to register using your G-mail, Twitter, Facebook, AOL or other ID. I can’t help wondering whether Second Life and other platforms won’t allow you, at some point, to do the same.
Augmented Reality Calling Cards
But I suppose there’s still hope. Because if I want some sort of control over my identity portfolio, maybe other people do to, and if that’s the case then maybe there’s a business in that. Pais pointed me to this demo of an augmented reality application for the new iPhone:
When I saw it, I couldn’t help thinking of Second Life calling cards. (Yeah, I know, totally useless as they exist today but hey). And I couldn’t help thinking of how it would be great to have “identity toggles” within Second Life, and then to use this as a basis for broader Web-based identity management tools – tools that could extrapolate from SL into “avatar-based” portfolios that we could use to interact with the Web more generally.
Sure, it might not be Linden Lab that leads the charge in giving us control over what data we present to the world, or what data is collected about us from others, but at the very least the idea of user-based control over avatar identity should be a sacrosanct feature of Second Life, and whatever else happens we should keep Google AdWords away from my in-world search history.
After Linden Lab bought XStreet SL, they made it so you can use your SL avatar name and password to login there, rather than having two separate (but linked) accounts.
If you watch the browser tab name and the status bar closely as you login to XStreet SL now, you’ll see it’s contacting id.secondlife.com and the tab name says something like “OpenID transaction in progress”. In other words, it would appear that Linden Lab has created OpenIDs for SL avatars, or at least for those with accounts on XStreet SL.
It would be a straightforward matter for Linden Lab to tell you your SL avatar’s OpenID URL and then you could use that to login (with your SL identity) to any website that accepts OpenID for sign-in. There are over 48,000 websites that accept OpenID as a method of registration or login.
I’ve just finished writing about this very issue of “silo ghettos” and their decline as part of my _Social Tesseracting_: a set of posts as part of the augmentology.com project:
“Decline of Silo Ghettos: as information deformation impacts knowledge forms, there’s an increasing need to provide social tesseractors with comprehensive dimensional engagement. This type of borderless interaction deforms monostreams into cross-channelled productions. Social tesseracts assist in addressing the walled garden approach to software and platform production [think: the isolation encountered in the locked door syndrome]. Google Wave is one system that removes such constraints and allows user input to migrate into previously distinct arenas. Other instances of interoperable systems that require the reorientation of Information Silos:
* augmented applications that encourage a pairing of geolocative and geophysical needs
* bridging software that links previously disparate platforms together [think: IRC-to-Second Life Chat Bridge].”
http://arsvirtuafoundation.org/research/2009/07/24/_social-tesseracting_-part-3/
Cheers,
Mez
I did? Throw me in a link, please, I don’t remember saying that… :/
Uh oh….you’re gonna kill me Vint….the thread I was thinking about was here, and it wasn’t you…sorry!
http://dusanwriter.com/index.php/2008/04/04/slippcat_freebies/
Mez – thanks so much, I missed your post (have you in my reader but I far too often fall way behind)….really amazing post, a MUST read. Will visit more often.
Yes, the avatar is a channel that I tune into when I want to do all those things associated with that avatar, and I’d like it to keep integrity, and not have that integrity constantly banged on and hammered on to crack it to link it to my real life name not out of some “fear of being responsible” but simply out of a desire to manage different aspects of my life’s activities *as I wish*.
I don’t hide this connection and indeed it’s not only available on Google, some people, precisely like Vint Falken, have made it a blood sport to Google bomb me and attempt to link this avatar name with my RL name as a form of harassment (Google it to see what I mean); hilariously, the Google bomb meant to “intimidate and shame me for life” is connected to a hate-page that Benjamin Duranske used to keep and update hysterically about me linking my RL and SL names…until he got a real job in a law firm and then deleted his hate-page because it really was unprofessional. So Vint’s hate-page links to a Duranske 404 lol.
I’ve never known anyone in SL to link RL and SL links for good purposes; it is always used as a form of brutal bullying and hate in an effort to try to shame and intimidate someone into silence of criticism, or to act in a certain way, or even to give up something like a transgendered identity. It’s disgraceful that people do that, and frankly, when people bully and harass me using this technique as Vint has done, I response by giving and equal and opposite pushback and doing it back to them, as it is the only way to deter bad behaviour in the absence of a legislative and justice system sin SL.
The call for RL/SL linkage can seldom be demonstrably shown to be in good faith, for good and moral purposes. The Metanomics pressurizing on this is odd, because those in business who need to use their real names either buy their real names at the outset, or put their real names on their profiles somewhere, sometimes smushing a first-last name into a first SL name and taking an SL last name. Such an act should be voluntary. if such people then wish to build networks among themselves and privilege that sort of behaviour of RL-SL linkage, that’s great, but then…they should have no felt need to bludgeon others into doing this.
That they do speaks volumes about what this is really all about: power over other people, and the endless debate about whether those who are anonymous have made a power play over other people, or whether they have a hedge against the attempt by others to have power over them.
As for Google Android, you’re not only right to raise this issue, it’s worse than you know. It is invading the home:
http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/22/google-android-homes-technology-wireless-google.html
Don’t worry, if I’d ever kill you, it won’t be over this. But err… thank you for thinking about me, even if it wasn’t necessary. :d
Just for the record, I find a situation where the same overlapping company controls most of our search traffic, most of our statistical data for whom visits our websites, most of the advertistements on the internet, most of the maps, most of the ‘streetviews’, and even a parts of the medical data of the – american – internet users pretty spooky. Monopolies are never a good thing, and I don’t think Google should have one, regardless how ‘well meaning’ they are suppose to be.
I don’t mind giving – what is considered ‘private’ inSL – date out, such as gender, age, location, profession, the fact that I have a cold, and even posting on facebook when I’ll be in London and when I’ll be in Belgium. When you see the errors that lately have been made as it comes to safeguarding data – by governement, search enginges, banks, military, … – I do think that the majority of nations should go and sit down, and have a good chat about international privacy and how they plan to handle citizen data now and in the future. And which restrictions on keeping data they want to impose.
Ann / Vint
As for responding to good ‘ld Prok above, as he constantly sees no malice in attacking ‘fellow avatars’ on their ‘first life’ identities – and very personal parts of those the least, it is not but just that not just ‘he’, but also ‘she’ (we still don’t know who’s puppeteering whom) is held responsible for those outragious statements.
I’m sure if she did not only keep to the ToS, but also only slightly to the social norms that did arrise over time in the Second Life and SLbloggers community, no harm would have come over the search ranking of her RL identity on Google.
[...] two articles that provide an idea of Dusan Writer’s thinking process: http://dusanwriter.com/ http://dusanwriter.com/index.php/2009/07/25/virtual-worlds-calling-cards-and-identity-interoperabili... [...]