Normally I wouldn’t write about signing up for a service, but Second Life pulls one of my privacy pet peeves in their sign up procedure and they do a very crummy job of it. Well, if I’m going to write about the good, I’m going to write about the bad.

On the first registration page, they ask for your birth date and give a reason for requiring the birth date.

Please provide an accurate birthrate for your own protection. We ask your birthrate to verify your account if you ever forget your Second Life name or password.

Normally, when a company asks for your birthday or postal (zip) code, it is because they want to use this information to better understand their customers. I don’t mind sharing this information with websites that I like; I give away a lot more information anytime I use my credit card, and it helps the site make money. What I don’t like is when the site tries to mislead me as to why they want this information. Online stores that have real-life equivalents often say they need postal code to check if their stock in your region. Needing my birthday to verify account ownership seems like a plausible excuse, but I doubt that it is the real reason that they ask for my birth date.

I almost choked later on in the registration process when they asked me to choose a security question.

If you forget your password, Linden Lab will ask you a question to verify your account holder status. Select a question from the drop down menu (“Security Question”) and enter the answer to that question in the space below.

Wait a moment, wasn’t my birthday needed for verification? I was pretty sure that they were being misleading when they asked for my birthday to recover lost passwords, but to be stupid enough to ask me to choose a security question a short while later…

But, to give them the maximum benefit of the doubt, I decided to look in to this a little further and clicked the recover password link on the main site. They give you three ways of recovering your password, but none of them involve your birthday.

It is not that they ask for personal information that bothers me, but that they aren’t honest about why they want it. Maybe the information is more valuable to them than my opinion, fair enough, but, not having even logged on to Second Life, my opinion of them is already soured.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 9:27 pm and is filed under Second Life, Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.