Social Network XING supports Second Life names

Over the weekend the very popular social network XING made changes to their profile pages and now has a field called "Second Life Name". That's pretty nice to see, because a lot of folks from Second Life are also a member of XING.

There is also a Second Life group called "Second Commerce" with about 400 members. Within this group this feature has been discussed in the past. One reason for a generell discussion was the fact, that XING closed profiles, which obviously have been created for avatar names and not real persons.

The question is now: if a lot of people will use this new feature, has this any impact on the question if avatar names are understood as personal data? This would have legal consequence - at least in germany - because saving pesonal data in anyway is pretty much restricted in germany and is subjected to a few policies.