Curiosity and Privacy

"How do you know you're right, with your answers?" he said.

"I don't. But every question's a tension inside, a little electric shock, and it crackles through me till it finds an answer. When a question touches an answer, it grounds on intuition, there's a blue flash, the tension's gone. It doesn't say right or wrong, it just says answered."

This passage is from "Running From Safety" written by Richard Bach. Richard is talking to his younger self, Dickie, about learning and knowing how he knows things. Dickie wants to know how he knows when he has a right answer. Honestly, we don't know. I really like and agree with Bach's answer. A lot of times, we aren't certain that we know the answers, but we can feel if they're right sometimes...it's like an intuitive feeling and you feel like the "tension's gone".

I've always wanted to know about the world around me. I have been called a "little explorer." It's not about what I learn so much as it's the process in which I learn that little token of thought...that delicious answer. When I discover it, something in me clicks and I know that I have the answer. It's a wonderful sentiment.

Now about privacy, last night at a Phoenix 201 class about the Phoenix viewer, I learned about SL web profiles. I searched my name and sure enough, my name can be found from secondlife.com. I heard that it had been there for a year already. Is this one reason why the TOS was updated? Only now people have started to talk about it, besides redzone. However, redzone has been around for awhile, so why the anger now? I learned about redzone in October or November not long before I de-friended jonny. He had told me that there were toys to identify if someone had an alt. Anyway, these web profiles are a violation of privacy. I think that viewing SL profiles should be a privilege only limited to SL residents and should only be viewable inworld. At the SL website, there can be profiles...but only if people want to create one. It could be like a simple profile like a blogger profile for instance...you can control what you put in. I also learned from a post by Kabaleyero Kidd that you even have your own profile link...made me think of myspace. Only difference is...with myspace, you expect to be searchable and you make up the profile link. But with SL, none of us made our profile links...SL made them behind our backs. Sure, there is a privacy setting that you can change but this is after the fact, just like grid reports are made sometime after residents have been crashed because of a nice "unscheduled" region rollback. They like to say "resolved" just after it happens and you don't know ahead of time usually. See if you can find the privacy tab. I'm still looking for it. It feels like LL just pulled the rugs out from under our feet. Kidd says that a lot of people wanted this, but I'm thinking that those people are a minority. Privacy is such a loaded issue these days due to 9/11, NSA wiretapping, street cams in London, crowded living areas across the globe, etc. Once again, LL shows how it doesn't really care about us, the residents who keep LL alive through upload fees, membership fees for those who are premium, rent for mainland sims, commissions from items posted on marketplace...did I miss anything?

Here's the link to Kidd's blog: http://www.in2ndlife.com/2011/02/take-advantage-of-the-new-second-life-web-profiles/