Something rather odd has been happening in the search terms of the old blog (which I still check for the Those Little Questions series). There seems to be a strange and sudden increase in people wanting to know… well, see for yourselves:

– sl viewer 2 how to know someone looks at me
– how to find out if someone is looking at your profile second life
– second life know what others are looking at
– can people in second life know if your seeing them?
– can you tell if people look at your profile in sl
– how to know if someone is camming you on secondlife
– can someone tell if i look at their profile on sl

And that’s just in the last week. Usually a plethora of sudden and new search terms like this is indicative of something happening somewhere (for example: when Linden Lab introduced Basic Mode as the default mode for new viewer downloads the blog received an unprecedented flurry of people wanting to know where their inventory had gone and how to get it back). I don’t know if the old rumour that “omg people can tell if you’re reading their profile!” has been sent out in a large group, or if something to do with avatar privacy has been blogged about or asked on the official Forums or SL Answers. But something is up, because I don’t usually get a sudden increase in specific questions like that without a reason.

If you’re here to find out the answers to those questions, then it used to be possible to see if someone was looking at you (aka: camming onto you) by enabling Show Look At in the Advanced menu of your viewer. I think (don’t quote me, because I don’t run that viewer) that this ability was removed from Viewer 2. However, also, many third party viewers have settings that allow you to not show your avatar’s “looking at” crosshairs, so there’s no guarantee that the avatar halfway across the store from you isn’t checking you out anyway. They’re probably admiring your outfit or maybe inspecting your hair to find out where you got it from, because they like it so much. Please don’t get defensive and send accusing IMs to them, demanding that they stop looking at you. Take it as a compliment instead!

To the best of my knowledge, though, there is no way for any avatar to tell if you’re reading their profile, either in-world or on the website.