Above: A Bonnie bot, tirelessly on bot patrol
There's been lots of interesting conversation and debate spurred by my post on BonnieBots, the new website tracking genuine Second Life activity. While Bonnie's bots don't violate any Linden Lab policy that I'm aware of, the sheer amount of information that both her avatar and web-based bots are able to collect and surface on the site has generated much surprise and controversy (including in comments here).
Reader Kate Nova argues that much of the pushback is based on a very understandable distrust of surveillance provoked by very real abuses by the Internet giants:
I was surprised and disappointed to discover that there's so much hating on them. SL can be narrow and intolerant in so many ways. Ban Lines and Security Orbs make the idyllic SL mainland into an untraversable minefield of hate and GTFO-ness.
Obviously, I'm not the arbiter of anyone else's security and privacy concerns. If you feel that your parcel needs ban lines, or a 10-second security orb, or that the stuff in your profile is private info, it's not my call to dispute that. I kinda wish it were my call, because I think all of these diminish the SL experience, but SL or Physical World, it is, of course, not my call. And it shouldn't be, no matter how frustrated they make me.
Surveillance Capitalism as heavily practiced by Google & Facebook have rightly made everyone security and privacy conscious. Or paranoid. Ironically, if we ever do regulate this, it will be after Google & Facebook already have enough data to control us in perpetuity. Any future regulations will more likely serve to lock out competition and cement these giants in place. On this topic I recommend Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff and Zucked by Roger McNamee.
Some concern has been raised that Bonnie's bots also pull data from user profiles available in search, but Kate argues this is not the intrusion some say it is — and that overall, the site is incredibly valuable:
On the SL Profiles, again, I'm not the arbiter of your privacy. Still, it's not a private, offline diary. It's a "public" (to me at least) Online Profile. The only reason I can see to write a profile is to have other people read it. And since it's an avatar profile, not a fleshvatar profile, I don't see a way that it could be connected to any sort of doxxing, unless you choose to put your first life details on your Profile's tab. From what I've seen, a few avatars, academics and researchers, for example, do put FL info on the FL tab, but the vast majority of avatars do not. I can't imagine posting words or images on my SL Profile that I didn't want people to read or see…
Regardless of how one feels about BonnieBots Avatar Search, I love all the other tabs of informative data about the world I care so much about! My favorite tab is "Attachments". So many designers do "what body do you wear" type surveys. Which strike me as almost pointless as they are so easily gamed by someone alerting their group to go vote (skew) so-and-so's pole. Assuming BonnieBots methodology is sound, here's a chance to get an accurate sense of the % of Lara vs the % of Legacy, etc, etc. I watched Kupra's meteoric rise, followed by Reborn's meteoric rise, followed by designers who'd recently started rigging for Kupra already abandoning it in favor of rigging for Lara-Legacy-Reborn. Why? What was reality?
With BonnieBots Attachments tab you can get a real sense of on the ground, or "on the grid" reality of what people use. In my example, you can see Lara with a sizeable lead, then Legacy, and then Reborn significantly ahead of Kupra in on the grid usage. Should that be private information? Should only Maitreya, LeLUTKA, et al know how much usage their bodies and heads have? IDK.
I'm glad it's public at least for now. It does seem like over time more and more information gets locked down. To me, locking down public access of information tends to advantage orgs like CIA, MI6, Google, Facebook, et al. On the topic of publicness, I highly recommend Jeff Jarvis' book Public Parts.
More here and on this /SecondLife Reddit thread. And more about Bonnie Bots on New World Notes soon.
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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