Second Life Privacy, Identity and Ownership

January 31st, 2007 - media lab, research, tools |

For my Hacking Second Life project I was interested in the trails of data each Second Life resident inadvertently generates without any awareness or control of its usage. While content creators in Second Life have some control over the licensing of their work, how do we navigate and manage the digital content created simply as a result of ‘living’ in a purely digital world in which our speech, gestures and actions are made of the same stuff as our code, clothes and cars? How do we decide whether others use this content? Can we set up personal license policies for our personal data?

To begin thinking about these issues, I wrote a small script that may be attached to any object, and that sends all locally overheard chat to a “Permanent Record” web application via an HTTP post. On the web, visitors may then view a list of the names and unique keys of all people recorded and all listening devices, and can view a live updating audit of all chat.

The site acts as a real time observation post of all conversations taking place within range of any of the listeners, revealing speaker identity, content, location and time. Check out the screenshot and screencast (24MB) of the permanent record and recorder in action.

SL Recorder Small

Web Interface

I plan to put up a more permanent version of the site as soon as possible, and I’ll install a few listeners around some MIT or Media Lab sanctioned land. I’ve been tempted to attach the script to a variety of different types of objects, especially projectiles so I could launch them towards interesting things happening. It would be interesting to have these things distributed all over the place, though at some point I’d probably be violating the Linden Lab ToS.

Luis and I tested out the recorder a little…
Second Life Listener

Unfortunately he felt compelled to sit on it.
Listener 2

Check out the LSL source code. If nothing else, it at least has some generalized little functions for sending RESTful HTTP posts. Since Second Life only allows 20 HTTP requests per 100 seconds, my code queues up overheard statements and sends them in batches.

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2 Responses to “Second Life Privacy, Identity and Ownership”

  1. Burak Arikan Says:
    February 2nd, 2007 at 5:31 am

    Hey Brent, the secondlife “microphone” is really interesting. Does it record the location as well? Can you make it into a product for sale? Is it possible to make replicas of it?

  2. brent Says:
    February 2nd, 2007 at 11:41 pm

    Hey Burak. It does record the location. It’s also possible to use a scanner to sense which people are around, so you could track all people who walk by, or all people who may be listening. Like any object created in Second Life, I can put this thing up for sale, and I have the option of letting the next owner view the source and replicate/modify it. The licensing options end there though. We’re going to have to wait for Jun’s license server…

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