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The Archives
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08.07.10Avatars as Diaspora: Identity and Content Wallets for the New Age of PrivacyThere's power in your avatar. In my recent post about MyWorld, a new mirror world social gaming platform, Metacam Oh commented that without avatars it isn't a game changer for the metaverse. Now, I'd argue that the metaverse is more broadly defined - it includes mirror worlds, augmented reality, and life logging. And so while MyWorld may not rattle the cages of World of Warcraft or Second Life, it will be a game-changer for "places" online in which users interact with each other. But Metacam is right that there is something significant about participating in a virtual space with an avatar. ...
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09.28.09The Surveillance SocietyOne of the more interesting conversations from the Engage Expo last week in San Jose was a dinner conversation about surveillance and privacy. Now, this isn't new, and if you've followed this blog you'll recognize my strange sense of, well....let's just call it utter confusion. Because the conversation always seems to go something like this: - Data is being collected about us in all kinds of formats and in all kinds of ways under the guise of providing us with more useful information. - I ask: isn't that bad? - The response: not really, because it means I get more ...
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03.18.09Second Life Transactions Jeopardize RL Privacy (Crazy Canadians)A report from the Privacy Commission of Canada has concluded that economic transactions in Second Life could be harmful to a user's real life privacy, according to the CBC. The commission published a report from Janet Lo, who conducted the study of SL while a law student at the University of Ottawa. The paper, entitled "Second Life: Privacy in Virtual Worlds," was commissioned by the commissioner, and its table of contents can be found here. She found that agreements made between Linden Labs and Second Life users didn't necessarily translate to transactions between avatars in-world. Lo cited the infamous happening ...
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10.17.08Second Life Privacy Flaw Allows Tracking of Users, Anywhere, Any TimeYour avatar's location can be mapped. And you don't need to give permission. What We Believe is Not Always Supported By Code As virtual world technologies are developed I've long been an advocate for considering the ways in which, one day, we'll wake up and wonder why basic policies can't be executed. The theory is that code is policy-free. OpenSim, for example, is called the Apache of virtual worlds, meaning it's just a bunch of code snippets that let's you cobble together a world. But I'm convinced that this obscures the fact that code is built on models, and models are created ...
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06.09.08Clever Zebra Cleverly Publishing Sim Visitor Profiles to the WebEdit: Since posting this, Clever Zebra CEO 57 Miles sent me a clarification that neither Clever Zebra nor, he believed, Mechanized Life were aware that the data was being posted openly. He expected the matter to be resolved within 24-48 hours. As I said when I originally posted this, I wasn't picking on Clever Zebra - their feed just happened to be the one I picked up. While I still have a problem with visitor data being collected without a public notice, I'm confident that the publishing of this data in a 'publicly available' format was never the intention of ...
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