Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Last night I teleported to a cozy patio with a firepit on a tiny asteroid to talk with the team of Bonnie Bots, the little Second Life user data website causing enormous controversy across the Second Life community. Since the imbroglio flared up, they have updated the site's homepage with this disclosure:

 

Information about Second Life should be freely accessible by all. We intend to make previously obscured information available to all residents, enable open use of the information, and expand available toolsets to further content creation.  All information collected and made available is publicly accessible and is not, and never will be, utilized for any monetary gain. We support individual privacy and will never attempt to obtain information not contained within or relevant to Second Life.

 

"We understand there are people upset about us releasing our data publicly," as team spokesperson Skyler Pancake explains. "However, people need to understand there are individuals and groups collecting this data secretly. Anyone with a little effort can easily collect this information and include it in seemingly harmless objects. The concern shouldn't be over us releasing this information publicly but who else is privately maintaining such databases and not informing anyone."

 

As the team and I chatted on the asteroid, one of the Bonnie Bots itself primly sat in silence. They warned me to take a picture of her quickly, because she was programmed to go back on her rounds across the Second Life grid soon.

 

While the Bonnie Bots team has bore the brunt of this controversy, they wanted to make it clear that they are hardly the only people collecting data on Second Life users — and how much is already publicly accessible for people to collect off them:

 

 

 

"This is the first time people are realizing how much information can be easily collected on your avatar within Second Life," as Pancake puts it.

 

"The amount of data being collected by complete strangers can be startling when you first learn about it. Although BonnieBots has no interest in data not contained within Second Life and has taken efforts to ensure none of our data is personal identifiable information, the potential for other Second Life services to collect and analyze such information is considerable."

 

"All of this publicly available right?" I ask. "So someone could hire some people in the Philippines to do this manually and get the same data for cheap." 

 

"M-hm."

 

"How do you track Premium accounts? Is it public?"

 

"100%. It's a code feature built in by Linden Lab in part to help land owners set access terms and such."

 

"It’s very useful to see how much revenue Linden Lab is making."

 

Linden Lab has been cagey about how many Premium accounts it has. But if the Second Life community could get a count of them, and track its growth as a revenue stream, they could (for example) use that data to ask for a discount on sim tier and other costs. 

 

"It's definitely one potential use," Pancake agrees. "We were able to figure out very loose estimates of how much Linden Lab is making off Marketplace sales alone." (More on that in another post.)

 

The team has been updating the site to adjust to community demands — including a feature to enable Second Life merchants to opt of tracking.

 

"But isn’t it a valuable data point for the SL user community?" I point out. (As I've said before, if the American public did not know which people and companies were the most wealthy, there would be general outrage.)

 

Pancake tells me the team agrees the merchant data is indeed valuable:

 

"For the most part Second Life has been considered irrelevant for over a decade now. Revealing how much a designer can make via Second Life will hopefully help inspire other content creators to join.

 

"Additionally, as a person who's done a considerable amount of shopping myself, it's both neat and helpful to see who the top designers actually are. Some of the top stores are ones I've never even heard about and which I've now made some purchases from. If nothing else, it's a free form of advertising for the designers."

 

It will be interesting to see how many designers see it that way too. In the meantime, many merchants are asking the Bonnie Bots team to have their brand name masked:

 

"We've had discussions with various designers, some who've opted out, and are in the process of reworking the Marketplace Listing to address their concerns. We also have some ideas on how we can both improve on the accuracy of the sales data and various ways of making the information more helpful."

 

And so for now the Bonnie Bots will continue wandering the world, collecting data, even if that means occasionally getting booted by a bot tracker. And the Second Life community collectively argues whether knowing this much about their world is a boon or a burden or both.

 

UPDATE, 4;32pm PST: The Bonnie Bots team just added a FAQ here.