Privacy

The first article in the Linden Lab Privacy Policy states: “We collect personal information and usage statistics to maintain high-quality customer experience and deliver superior customer service”. This is a fairly generic statement, which can be interpreted in many ways. This is essential, because the company understands its commercial success extraordinarily well and explains to the potential participant what information will be used in what way, and how it could be made accessible to third parties.

When registering, the user decides on his/her first name and chooses a surname from a dropdown menu. The list of possible surnames is culturally very diverse. You can state your preference for names like Abdallah, Delgado, Gao, Ivanova, Izumi, Kovacs, Lehmann, Xingpeng, Young and Zwiers. One can only speculate about the reasons for such a list, although it is likely that a user would tend to choose a name that resembles his/her own name and/or fits into his country of origin.

User verification

A date of birth (that is also used for verification if a user forgets his/her password - users are encouraged to use their own dates of birth) and an e-mail address are also requested to complete the registration. Linked to the user behavior in the community, this data provides a wealth of information for any company. The registration is also linked to an IP address, leading to speculation about the linking of virtual data with real personal data.

Of course this is not to insinuate that Linden Lab is involved in fraudulent practices, merely that the digital identity of consumers is closer to their real identity than they might think.

Big Brother or reality?

The ease with which a real identity can be converted into a digital identity and then misused is revealed in the recent judgment against the owner of the New York company Compulinx. When choosing his favorite victims, this director stayed close to home and concentrated on his own employees. He used their identities to negotiate loans or make credit card applications. Together with his cousin, the fraudulent CEO made over 1 million loan requests in the names of the 50 employees in his company. The director was sentenced to 165 years in prison and given a fine of 5.5 million dollars. His cousin faces a possible 35 years in prison and a fine of 1.25 million dollars.

This is certainly another of those notorious “American cases”, but it does demonstrate that Big Brother (as in the concept described by George Orwell in his book “1984” and not the reality TV program) is much of a reality than many might think. Personal information is indeed the most valuable information we have.

Living in the virtual world

Certainly, Second Life and online communities more generally raise the question of data quality in the virtual world. If ‘virtual’ data is tied closely to real data what are the risks? What protection should be put in place and how do organisations go about ensuring that data is correct? With identity theft a growing phenomenon in the ‘real’ world – how long before it becomes so in the virtual world, costing both real and virtual money to business and people alike? ::

ABOUT Human Inference

Human Inference provides solutions to enhance the quality of data. We focus on high quality solutions developed for large databases and mission-critical systems. The solutions are based on natural language processing and contain a core of knowledge to provide our customers with the best quality possible.

In 1986, when Human Inference was established, data was used in a wide range of systems, and data quality was considered to be a minor issue. Human Inference realized that the quality of data highly influences the results of analyses, such as fraud detection by insurance companies. Moreover, Human Inference recognized the value of data for all business processes, a fact quite underestimated at that time. In addition, we discovered that to reach the desired results, mathematical logic is not sufficient. The knowledge about the language and culture of a country was necessary as well. Human Inference proved to be right, since today the largest companies of the world are using our knowledge-based software to improve the quality of their data.

The scope of data quality has changed. Today the value of data is recognized on a broad scale and is restricted not only to name and address data. In addition, data quality has become more and more of a business issue than merely an IT issue. Data quality is a critical success factor for large CRM, ERP or BI projects that require solid investments. Data is the core of the information system of any company, influencing all company processes.