By David Norfolk - Editor's blog
We all know about the risk of identity theft in the real world, or we should know about it. But what about the virtual world?
Holger Wandt of Human Inference, a specialist in natural language processing to remove errors and duplicates from real world datasets, recently raised an interesting question concerning personal information in the virtual world.
"The average consumer feels their personal information should be stored correctly, securely, and reliably; but how does the same consumer feel about his or her data in community networks, such as the phenomenally popular Second Life?" Wandt asks. "Will we be recording 'virtual' information as well as ordinary personal data in future? And will we then proceed to link this data?"
There are many ways of using (or exploiting) data, some far from obvious.
Let's think about virtual communities such as Second Life. Could they perhaps compromise your identity? Would your Avatar leak information that could be used to steal your real world identity if asked for it by a particularly interesting ´“ or sexy - virtual being? Are you, perhaps, less cautious in a virtual world?
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