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Privacy policy

Before descending into more formal language (and please do read everything below as well), the condensed version is that nothing related to your Second Life account is generally something we know about unless you choose to reveal it, in which case it will be obvious when you do (i.e. submitting a crash report with “Include avatar name” checked) and it will also always be optional.

More importantly, any personal information shared will be used solely for what it was provided for: i.e. if you enter your/an email address to make a comment, or start an issue on the bug tracker, then that is used solely as a requirement of the website in question and not something we will specifically look at. Similarly if you opt-in to include your avatar name with a crash report it’s used only in the context of looking at why you crashed (i.e. to contact you for more information).

Website

Non-personally-identifying information made available by your browser (such as browser type, referring site, and the date and time of each request) is – like it is for most websites – stored in a log on the hosting server, along with potentially personally-identifying information such as your IP address. The retention period for each day’s worth of visits is 7 days, after which it is automatically deleted.

Information in those logs will only be used for anonymous aggregated statistics: i.e. the number of visitors in a given day or month, or the number of downloads of a specific release.

Viewer login screen This is the page that is normally shown when you start the viewer. Since it’s basically a web page the previous paragraph applies here as well. Additionally, no personally-identifying information (i.e. avatar name or username) is sent back to the site at all.

Crash Reports

Special attention has been given to ensure that Catznip crash reports contain only as much information as they need to (which is significantly less than is included by default in other viewers). This makes our life easier as we aren't digging through mountains of data we have no use for and further protects your privacy.

A submitted crash report is retained only for as long as is needed: once it has been looked over there is no further need for it and it will be permanently deleted. General information about a crash log may be shared with Linden Lab (i.e. in the form of a P-JIRA if for instance notice that a significant number of people are all experiencing the same crash but can’t fix it), the crash report itself will be treated as strictly personal and will not be shared.

Required Information

This is the bare minimum information we need to identify and diagnose your crash. If we can't tell what was going on, we can't possibly hope to fix it.

Non personally identifying information such as which operating system you're using, video card and amount of memory.
A minidump; a binary file that will allows us to see where in the code you crashed, containing minimal variable information from the crash.

Optional Information

Optional additional information you can choose to submit, this is more in realm of extremely useful and can really help resolve issues.

  • Your avatar name; This is helpful should we have specific questions.
  • Your settings.xml; For identifying configuration settings that might be related to the crash.
  • The last 16kb of your Second Life log file (not your chat logs).

Beta Viewers

Beta viewers are likely to submit more information with crash reports, and that data will come under greater scrutiny as we work to resolve problems. There is the possibility that this data may include your computer user name, the Second Life usernames of people you interact with, or the nature of interactions (inventory offers, etc).

The scope of this information will change from version to version depending on what is being debugged at the time. We strive to keep the submitted data to the minimum required.

Changes to this policy

This privacy policy might change from time to time: any significant changes will be explained specifically (a significant change would be a change in intent, or a change in what is collected or how it is used, etc) even if it’s only to point out that it is has changed.

We are deeply committed to protecting your privacy in Second Life, even in your interactions with us.