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FindYourFriend HUD


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The HUD in question: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/FYFFindYourFriend-TrackingHUD/8951456

I'm just going to post this here. Maybe if enough people get upset it will get removed.

Ok, so this HUD was able to find my main account at her home. I contacted Support to ask if this was a violation of ToS and was told it's a marketplace item and to simply flag the item. I have, but it's still there.

I'm not sure that's having any impact.
These are disallowed actions according to the SL MARKETPLACE LISTING GUIDELINES and I can't find anywhere to post this info when I do flag it.
 
Any stalker can find you.
  • Listings for harmful or disruptive content. The SL Marketplace is not to be used for transmitting content or code that may be harmful, impede other users' functionality, invade other users' privacy, or negatively impact Second Life or the Second Life Marketplace systems.
He bribes people with 2 weeks free if they give him a 5 star review and if you leave a lower review he flags it and removes it giving him all 5 star reviews.    
  • Anti-Competitive or Abusive Behavior. Examples include, but are not limited to:
  • inflating prices on the SL Marketplace, in comparison to in-world or other e-commerce sites,
  • posting hostile or false reviews or comments on a competing merchant's items,
  • posting reviews that encourage users to buy competitor products, or visit in world locations,
  • posting item listings that are abusive or disparaging with respect to another merchant or their products.
  • using alternate or related accounts to purchase or rate your own items,
  • rewarding buyers for reviews unless both positive and negative reviews are rewarded.

I don't know what else to say other than if LL is going to allow this then why not just force us all to have mapping rights on again like it's 2006 so at least this guy can't make money off it.

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I couldn't resist. This is pretty much a scam unless they have planted sensors laying around on any open rezzing parcel in the grid.

So here is the text on the No Modify NC included with this product....

=============================================================

[FYF] Find Your Friend - Information
--------------------------------------
Did you ever wanted to locate your friends anonymous without locating permission and this legal?
This is now possible:
With this HUD you can search without locating authorization any avatar anonymously and legally.
The HUD displays to you where the avatar is or was and when this positioning has taken place.
Of course, the location can not always be up to date because we only work with scripts without cracked software.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To find people you have to click on the HUD.
Then a dialog box appears where you must decide if you enter the name or the UUID of the requested person.
When you decided one of the two options you press the provided button.
This will open a TextBox. In this you can type either the name or the UUID and press Send.
Now the HUD searches for the desired person.
If the person has been found, the map will open and show where the person is or was.
In the chat you see a message that only you can see.
In this message you can read when the person was on the Sim.
If the person is not found there we are very sorry.
In this case, it is not counted as an avatar search

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

With this HUD you can use our NORMAL MODE service 1 month for free!
Then would you have to activate the HUD for a small fee:

FREE MODE = max. 1 Avatar search per day!

NORMAL MODE = max. 25 avatar search per day:
- 1 day = 10 L $
- 1 week = 50 L $
- 1 month = 100 L $
- 1 year = 1000 L $

PRO MODE = max. 250 avatar search per day:
- 1 day = 50 L $
- 1 week = 250 L $
- 1 month = 500 L $
- 1 year = 5000 L $

Our terminals to pay the fee can be found here:

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Amado%20Isle/253/219/21 ]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We hope you have fun with our HUD.
Your FindYourFriend Team!

=============================================================

So which scammer do we think is offering this item? I'm guessing they have painstakingly collected a database of Avatar Names and all the places they visit where one of these sensors is located and.or more likely have harvested all the public Groups and Picks shown in the Account Profile.

 

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This might actually be what those spinbots are for, in which case, they do indeed violate user privacy and should be reported. I shall investigate and return with my findings.

 

--Edit--

This should have replied to the main post not the last post and not a reply to the mainpost. :v

--Edit 2--

This is pure speculation, as such do not take anything this says for truth as it might not be the truth at all. Only people who can make it certain is German Land Holding or Linden Lab themself. I looked at the Community Guidelines and there does not appear to be any rule against mentioning names based on findings which are avaliable to the general public, if this is not true please shoot me a IM/PM/Reply and I'll remove it.

According to my findings, the terminal script is created by xxWOLLOWxx.Resident (This is publicly obtainable information, just inspect the terminal at FYF's main store), they also are the "Technician of German Land Holding".

From what I am guessing, Technician meaning the webmaster and scripter of GLH. This may mean those objects they have on their estates that spam profiles with "Thank you for your interest in german land holding" also log the location of agents as they visit and depart. Again this is pure speculation and might not be true.

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I really doubt the claims that there is no way to track another avatar's location without having sensors everywhere.

Explain to me how I can visit a sim that I've never been to before, look at offline moderator list, go back to a sim that I regularly hang out in, and later that day see the offline moderator from the other place teleport to my hangout? I had never seen that person in the sim that I frequent, yet the same day I visit his sim, he conveniently decides to venture out and find me? I don't believe in perfect coincidences like that. Especially considering the sim I hang out in was not a popular area. New people were rare.

Also, what's with those reviews of the Find Your Friend hud? People shamelessly, happily thanking him for allowing them to track people down.... People who didn't consent to being tracked down.. As if they're doing nothing wrong..... There's a reason we have the OPTION to allow friends to find us or not.

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AnimalChi wrote:

I really doubt the claims that there is no way to track another avatar's location without having sensors everywhere.

Alternatively, the person being tracked could be wearing something that allows the HUD to track them.  It could be voluntary or they could have been tricked into it.  For example they could have been given jewelry as a 'gift' with a hidden tracking script.  The person that sells the HUD could also have a lot of bots that are tp'ing to sims and checking what avatars are on it. If you will note, they don't claim to be able to find someone in real time or that they can always find them.  If found, the HUD will tell you where the avatar 'was' but they don't guarantee that they will still be there.  These two alternatives still are working as sensors.

Explain to me how I can visit a sim that I've never been to before, look at offline moderator list, go back to a sim that I regularly hang out in, and later that day see the offline moderator from the other place teleport to my hangout? I had never seen that person in the sim that I frequent, yet the same day I visit his sim, he conveniently decides to venture out and find me? I don't believe in perfect coincidences like that. Especially considering the sim I hang out in was not a popular area. New people were rare.

Believe it or not, it is either a coincidence, you gave this person mapping rights, you are wearing something that was given to you that can track you or you are just mistaken.

Also, what's with those reviews of the Find Your Friend hud? People shamelessly, happily thanking him for allowing them to track people down.... People who didn't consent to being tracked down.. As if they're doing nothing wrong..... There's a reason we have the OPTION to allow friends to find us or not.

If people are being rewarded for leaving good reviews as stated in the OP, is it any wonder people are writing false reviews praising the HUD?  Alternatively, he could be using alts, getting friends to post reviews or paying people.  It's illegal but it happens.

You of course are free to believe what you want to believe.  However, before you decide I suggest you either study scripting so you aren't ignorant of what can and can't be done with a script or find an expert scripter that you trust and ask them these questions.  They will tell you the same thing.

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I will continue to suspect that there is a method of remotely tracking avatars without requiring assistance from the avatar themselves. Even if I took the time to learn all there is to know about scripting (Or so I think), I would not be bold enough to claim that it is 100% impossible to track people in Second Life without any help from them. Because surely, I don't know everything.

Especially after having experienced multple situations where there is no other explanation than being remotely tracked. Yes, without accepting candy from strangers or confusing things like a complete newbie. c_c

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AnimalChi wrote:

I really doubt the claims that there is no way to track another avatar's location without having sensors everywhere.

... I don't believe in perfect coincidences like that.

I do "believe" in coincidences in that we only notice the unusual, and not the millions of friends who do not show up the infinite number of times they're least expected.

Also, Marketplace reviews of junk like this are usually planted garbage -- I mean, what sort of merchant conduct should we expect of somebody selling a stalker HUD? In this case, however, there's one reviewer whose name I'm pretty sure I recognize; I don't really know her to ask, but still I wouldn't expect her to write a bogus review for a reward.

And there is some history of avatar location "leaking" out. Folks seem to really want to stalk other folks -- enough so to invent some pretty wacky tricks. One from ages ago would (usually) detect where an avatar transports to (just one hop) by hammering llGetObjectDetails() for the targets through the moment of teleport. As you might expect, that exploit was super laggy and soon patched. Can't remember if anybody tried to scam money from it -- probably -- but the underlying script technique was widely known.

In the current case, my first question would be whether the successfully found avatars were all voice users at whatever location they were tracked. Not that I know of any current exploits, but that system has such a history of leaks that it's always among the usual suspects.

A more difficult to test suspicion would be cooperative data-gathering by some widely-used attachment. To confirm this, we'd need to know the attachments of everybody in sims where the stalker HUD finds targets, compared to those where it doesn't, and see if there's a pattern. (I'm not suggesting this as a real thing, but imagine if everybody who wears some brand of mesh avatar is unwittingly supplying a constant trickle of data about every avatar in every sim they visit.)

That would be a vast amount of data to process (hence a bit costly) but the fact that the stalker HUD's reported location data is not expected to be up to date suggests some such storage of collected data (as opposed to dispatching bots to scan a target's likely haunts at the moment of stalking).

I'm not crazy about the theory of stationary avatar-trackers: too easy to detect. I mean, there are networks of avatar sensors to feed Name2Key databases, for example, but it would be pretty easy to know whether a sim is always exempt from successful stalking when lacking such a device.

An army of data collection bots seems more practical, but still: pretty suspicious-looking. Possible, though.

It's maybe worth noting that, once this system gets bootstrapped, the stalker HUDs themselves become very good sources of the kind of data such a system could use: they'll be all over the locations where stalkers hang out, which seems the sort of place stalker victims would frequent, too.

 

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Good point. And a very recent (April 24th) arrival. And the stalker HUD's Marketplace account, too, is pretty newbie (April 11). Either or both could be cloaking oldbie accounts

OP claims to know about "mapping rights.. like it's 2006" -- something even I don't remember -- so evidently not the fresh-faced youth s/he purports to be. :matte-motes-sarcasm:

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It isn't an ad for the HUD. I greatly value my privacy in and out of SL. Getting the brushoff from Support made me decide I needed to take it a bit further. Flagging it did nothing. The creator flagged my negative review (and those of others) and had them removed. I'm hoping enough people will contact LL over this that they will take it seriously. I simply put the link to the HUD as reference and so others could see how easily accessable it was for anyone to get.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I found this thread from a comment posted on my blog.  I maintain a list of identified roaming bots in SL and this sounds like a plausible answer for what at least some of these bots are doing.  If the item is at all legit and works, the only real ways I could think of it accomplishing this through the system are the stationary sensors someone mentioned earlier or roaming bots.  

Putting up enough sensors to detect the proverbial needle in the haystack would be a bit difficult and likely costly, but a specialized bot agent could pick up the people around it and report back.  Get enough of these running and you might be able to do something like a "Find your Friends HUD" with at least passing accuracy.

I'm in full agreement on this though, this is just a bit too Red Zone for me and needs to be crushed out before it starts.  I've flagged the Marketplace item as well.  Hopefully enough people will do so to make LL take a look at it and remove it.

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AnimalChi wrote:

Explain to me how I can visit a sim that I've never been to before, look at offline moderator list, go back to a sim that I regularly hang out in, and later that day see the offline moderator from the other place teleport to my hangout? I had never seen that person in the sim that I frequent, yet the same day I visit his sim, he conveniently decides to venture out and find me? I don't believe in perfect coincidences like that. Especially considering the sim I hang out in was not a popular area. New people were rare.

The question is, what did that person do once he had arrived at the hangout? Did he specifically talk to you rather than to others who were there? Did he try to get you to go back to the sim? Did he mentioned that you'd visited the sim?, or say anything that would indicate that he'd come looking specifically for you?

You asked for an explanation of how it happened, so how about this? He has a FindYourFriend HUD, and the bots/sensors that the HUD creator uses to gather data, had gathered data about you being at the hangout. It sounds like you're there quite a lot, so such data could easily have been gathered, and the fact that you were there when he arrived wasn't really much of a coincidence at all.

That's one possible explanation. The one that you prefer to believe can't happen.

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