Second Life, the online virtual world, recently encountered a privacy breach. According to a bulletin posted by Linden Labs, the San Francisco-based parent company, decided to take a proactive approach to reponding since they admittedly did not know what information of its over 660,000 users was accessible by hackers. Cory Ondrejka, CTO of Linden Lab had this to say:
"We're taking a very conservative approach and assuming passwords were compromised and therefore we're requiring users to change their Second Life passwords immediately. While we realize this is an inconvenience for residents, we believe it's the safest course of action. We place the highest priority on protecting customer data and will continue to take aggressive measures to protect the privacy and security of the community. "
This incident reminded me that your online life which could include blogging, your online photos, email, calendar, search queries, phone conversations via VoIP or in this case your Second Life information is not totally separate from your first life, your real life. Therefore, privacy and safety should still be something that is taken into account while performing actions online.
