;D

Just because data is there to be scraped off your land or profile, doesn’t mean you’ve consented to have it all scraped, aggregated, and matched with other things you did NOT consent to — like stalking records of 96m2 proximity to other avatars.

To keep speciously yammering about how the “data is all on your profile” or “the data is all in the world and visitor counters already count it” is to completely miss the point about *aggregation and manipulation* and the power that little pathetic dweebs like to wield over other people because they can’t get it any other way.

Obviously, the greatest value of this device was its *commercial* value. And Mark Barrett kept denying it had any commercial value and feigning lack of interest. By showing which non-camp-chair sims had real high traffic by people actually remaining proximate, you could get more useful data than from the gamed traffic statistics. You could also successfully compile dossiers on people about their relationships and use them to blackmail or control them. There’s lots of aggressive, manipulative, and malevolent uses to which this technology can be put.

The whining snicker of the script kiddies is to say, “But I can make it and use it therefore it’s ok”. They are devoid of any context whatsoever, and have no concept of how technology has to be integrated into society, not used to bludgeon people over the head. When it is used that way, people fight back hard — and they are right to.

Like Eddy Striker/John Hurliman, Mark Barrett has irresponsibly created and/or deployed AND justified something not just as a “whoopsie” but as a deliberately malevolent act — that people be damned, that people feeling harm by it are in “FUD”.

I hope these acts are indelibly inscribed in the Internet that they always run anonymously to and cite as justification for their acts (“everything’s public all the time”) and are reviewed by future employers and others hoping to understand their character.

Because people who have technical skills are not social, and people who are social lack technical skills. I think the herald should do a better job of emphasizing this point.

When TSO junked their reputational system of giving baloons, they replaced it with a system that did essentially this what MB’s system did. It automatically created a publicly visible friendship web based on how much time you spent near someone and/or interacting with them. Worse, there was and still is no opt out mechanism so far as I know. Mark’s system at least made things optional.

SL Stats is a good story, I think, because it highlights the division between the techie citizens and the social citizens, a rift that is going to keep creating earthquakes in SL.

Don’t even compare something like this, which simply registers and posts who you’ve been within 100m of in a virtual world most often (as well as your easily accessible profile statistics) on some website to the Patriot act and the government’s ability to wiretap, it’s not at ALL the same.

The one thing that could be considered a violation of anything on slstats was that, and even that offered no solid information. Campers would have people on their friends list they’ve never heard of, clubbers would have entire event populations as “close friends”, it’s trash data.

Wiretapping however has a purpose and a target, if you really want to get paranoid about spying then Americans here should look to their own government not some cheesey fun-but-pointless statistics system.

Thinking of how much fuss people make about their real life rights being “taken away” by things like the Patriot act… this is no different.