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.

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

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

http://dusanwriter.com/index.php/2008/04/04/slippcat_freebies/

“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

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.