On the undesirability of advertising in SL

I was recently invited to take part in a survey on advertising in SL (I infer that the Lindens noticed my income stream from land rentals at Mugunghwa and concluded that I am running an in-world business). If the survey is still online, and if there was no non-disclosure clause in it, I'll post the URL here so you can see for yourselves.

Executive summary: Brace yourselves for the deluge, my dears, because to them SL is apparently no different from that glossy magazine on your coffee table. This will be "targeted" advertising, selected just-for-you based on your group affiliations and what your friends have been purchasing lately. (This is the reason for the media-on-a-prim features of Viewer 2, by the way, not so that you can surf the web from within SL.)

I think this is a really bad idea, but I also think that LL doesn't give a sparrow's fart for my opinion or yours. Advertising is coming, and I suppose we will learn to ignore it just as we now ignore the google ads in the sidebars of many blogs and websites.

I was — to speak frankly — horrified by the trend of the questions, which can be taken as Linden Labs' ideas for the future of SL. Not the fact of advertising by itself, that is kinda shitty but not unreasonable.

What horrified me was the suggestion that it would be possible to target avs based on their typists' RL gender and/or age and/or location. This really pisses me off. It may be that the new TOS permit this, and I too agreed to those terms — primarily because I had no choice: the only alternative to agreeing to all provisions of the TOS in its entirety, is to abandon your avs and your friends, your inventory and your home, and leave SL forever. You can't even move to an OpenSim, because the identity that is "you" in SL can't get there. There is no provision for transferring accounts or identities or inventories, and certainly not friends' lists, between worlds.

Whatever the new TOS might permit, this feels like a breach of trust. My clear understanding when I signed up was that my RL info would be used only by the Lindens themselves, and only in the service of preserving law and order in-world. Advertising does not fit either of those cases.

I'm disappointed as hell, and what upsets me most is to realize the enormous gulf between what most of us think SL is, and what the Lindens think they have created (i.e. a platform for media distribution, financed by the sale of advertising) — and to infer how little they care about what we have made in their world. Which part of "make your own world" and "all user-created content" includes me being bombarded with advertising from companies whose advertising I already ignore in RL?