Recent buzz about Electric Sheep’s new search engine and bot that feeds it rose some questions we used to neglect. Sure, privacy questions was there from the day one. There was a problem with taking upskirt photos of other residents. Publishing your chat logs is ToS violation. There are some practical ways to keep your privacy. Banning some (groups) of residents from the parcels you control, red lines around your property, getting all the security items that can be bought in-world, putting skyboxes out of the reach of camera zoom…
By the development of bots and other technologies privacy becomes harder to achieve. And now, it is not just some bored newbie peeking through your walls watching for the first time avatars having sex. Now we have companies unleashing bots all over the grid massively scraping data for nobody-knows-which purpose.
As much as privacy is complicated issue in real life, things are even worse in metaverse. Really, where is the line between our public and private second lives? Internet is no more only the thing of web presentations and e-mails. It has gone far than IM clients and messengers, too. We are spending part of our lives on-line, and we don’t even need Second Life for that. And with Second Life and other virtual worlds things get really complicated.
Whether we are doing business (SL or non-SL based), building or scripting, killing each other’s avatars, screwing our minds all over the grid, just roaming around, meeting people or doing whatever else we are sending and receiving data over the internet. Yeah, that is simple and we all know that. We also do know that all that data is easy to be seen by somebody we do not encounter in our actions. We also do know that it is easy to search and filter all that data and to process it in any way somebody find usable or interesting.
Where do we put lines between something that is public and something that is private and to be kept inside the walls no matter that it is happening on-line? It is not only virtual worlds we have this kind of problem in. We are making some of our privacy public by publishing our profiles on MySpace. Our del.icio.us pages shows our browsing history better than any spyware. Google maps are making us and our property visible all the time.
One way to defend from paranoia is not to pay attention to all of this. One can skip the problem with “I don’t care” attitude and live happily. Why should I care if some bot is scanning all the objects on my land? I might pay no attention if somebody is watching my avatar on sexgen bed, even if highly descriptive and explicit chat is going on on channel zero. If something is really to be kept in secrecy, I’ll do it in encrypted e-mail. Problem solved?
No. It is not. Maybe we can find out ways around lack of private moments and places, but question is what will our world look like in a year or two if we leave out right to be alone, to tell something without possibility that every sentence is being recorded in some distant data-base, to do something that nobody will see.
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