Sparkle Bunny

Makes sense since you can no longer cash out without payment info anyway.

My reading of it is that Lindens consider payment details, email addresses and other RL info submitted upon registration to be 'personal information'. This is not available to other users or bots unless there is a serious data breach, and if that were to happen they would be obliged to inform all vulnerable customers as soon as it was discovered. They do not, apparently, consider your account status, location info, or anything you post in your profile to be 'personal information', and so it is fair game for anyone to republish and redistribute as they wish. If you were naive enough to think that the '1st life' tab was intended for RL info... nope, that is not the case. Since profile info is now searchable, I would strongly recommend removing any information that identifies you as a member of any marginalised groups in RL or SL, and/or restricting your IMs to friends-only. Opting out of one specific site is not a solution as it does nothing to prevent copycat sites springing up, as they surely will now this kind of data-gathering is explicitly permitted by LL.

How is it harassment? She just said she's fine with her pics being reused anywhere. If I stole your profile pic, you might have a case. But I'm not going to because you haven't said it's OK. See how it works?

I know it doesn't bug you, you already made that clear. Point is, some people care where their stuff gets republished even if you don't.

Cool, just grabbing your profile pic for myself then. Guess you shouldn't have shared it.

Of course they don't. They can't stop people republishing other people's content. That's up to the people who own the content. Personally I'm not interested in handing over my RL name and address in order to file a DMCA, but the option's there. What they can do is ban users/bots that exist solely for content-scraping purposes, or at the very least charge them for the privilege. They can ban bots for not declaring that they're bots. They can ban them because they don't like their username. Failing to respect the intellectual property clause seems a decent enough reason to me, but they don't even need a reason; they can ban them for any reason or none.

I mean, he'd need to know already that a) you were signed up to SL and b) what your username was, but OK.

Apparently not anymore! That privacy policy makes any form of inworld communication fair game for third parties to do whatever they like with. People have been posting chat logs on gossip sites for years, and there's never any comeback.

The recipients are other logged-in users who can view your profile. That includes bots.

here it is: That's from the Privacy Policy, and does seem in direct contradiction to the Intellectual Property clause in the ToS. I've granted LL permission to reproduce the text and images from my profile because profiles would be unusable without that; but I don't recall surrendering my copyright in the text and images to allow them to be republished anywhere without restriction.

So did we all. I have never posted any RL info on my profiles whatsoever, but it could be argued that the existence of the '1st life' tab encourages people to do so. Nor have I ever reused a username from another website in SL, but I'm sure that's happened too. All those people have now had their privacy compromised, because the walled garden they thought they were interacting within doesn't have functioning walls. I agree that this is not a legitimate use of bots.

Apparently, scripters had already figured out ways to access your subscription status (it needs to be visible to both the client and the server, so, yeah). The new function just makes it more straightforward to do what they were already doing. And even those who don't script know that 'no payment info on file' means you're looking at a basic account and all owners of Linden homes are premium, so... not really hidden, no.

That's not up to LL to control. It's up to the user to contact the website and get it removed. What is up to LL to control is the behaviour that its users (scripted or unscripted) are permitted to engage in. It's very unclear whether the owner of the profile-scraping bots consulted with LL about the legality of their activities beforehand, and equally unclear why LL agreed it was OK. I wish there was some transparency about what exactly the links are here, and whether LL are selling our data to third-parties or simply giving it away.

I can restrict my profile info on facebook and twitter so that only logged-in users can see it. Apparently I can't do that in SL any more, even though the web interface informed me that I could, and nobody bothered to inform me of the change in policy.

Given that you have to register to join SL in order to execute the scripts, that's a peculiar definition of public.. Meanwhile, you should probably delete https://my.secondlife.com/settings/privacy. It's misleading to suggest that people can control who their data is shared with when that is actually not the case.

People are supposed to declare their scripted agents to LL, right? So LL, in theory, should know who they are; their bot status should be in their profile, they should be required to have payment info used, they should show up on the map as a different colour to regular avatars, and I should be able to tick a box in land settings banning them from my parcel. And if I find a bot that isn't marked as such, I should be able to report them to LL so that they can either be brought into complicance or banned. Otherwise, I don't quite understand why LL bothers asking people to declare their scripted agents at all.

I have a Japanese av; she wears kimono and Asian skins. Editing your Caucasian skin and features in Photoshop seems weird to me when all you have to do is change your skin and shape in world; or, if you don't want to do that because you're too attached to your existing skin and shape... well, if you're that attached to them, why would you want to change them in post-processing? None of it makes much sense. And yes, the 'Oriental' terminology is... ugh. I can only assume that English isn't her first language.

Hopping to a theme you don't especially love can be a good way of weaning an alt off premium. Playing with a new house for a couple of days/weeks is a nice distraction which stops you thinking too much about the dream parcel you just gave up, and abandoning it when your subscription finally runs out is relatively painless.

Yes, Freya is still the better choice if you want a curvy body on a budget and would like to wear clothes; but it really depends what your avatar spends most of their time doing. If you're planning on hitting up the clubs in latex and just need, say, one pair of jeans to go shopping in, Erika will be fine.

Been broken for a while. I suppose if you're dedicated enough to the cause of festive lighting to use up that many prims, you're also sufficiently motivated to edit them into place yourself and hence don't really need the script?

Ah, so they're not actually interested in getting money from new subscribers, just in minimising their losses from Premiums cutting their costs. Got it.

WellMade and Entice usually have advents as well, and I think eBento event does a 12 Days? I remember getting some nice eyes from the latter a couple of years back.

Well, yeah. So is most of mainland. At least if I grab a Meadowbrook I'm not having to use prims up on the actual house, I'm avoiding the initial purchase price of a mainland 512, and a mostly-empty sim is seeing some use that it wouldn't otherwise have had. My hunch is that the majority of Plus subscriptions are going to be Premiums downgrading rather than Basics upgrading, which makes it unlikely that they'll manage to sell vast quantities of abandoned land; but including an actual parcel in the package, rather than just tier, would encourage more upgrades even if the homes in question are second-rate. Since there seem to be no immediate plans to get rid of the older homes or even remove them from the land page, LL might as well let Plus members make use of them while they're deciding what (if anything) they want to do with them.

General tip if you're searching for BoM layers; set your search results to display oldest items first, which should weed out any mesh/applier items. (Yes, it also increases the amount of dross you have to scroll through before finding anything decent, but that's just part of shopping on MP, right?)

Why not let Plus users have OLD Linden homes? It'd give them somewhere to hang out while they're looking for a mainland parcel, and encourages them to upgrade to Premium if they want something nicer. Kick them out after a couple of months if you're worried about the continent filling back up, but it seems a better use of resources than having so many 512 homes sitting empty.