Still seems like a problem to me. It breaks encapsulation.
The mutex is only used inside of SetAlive() and isAlive(), they're the only things this need to handle locking and unlocking. You don't want anything external to that calling the methods on RWMutex.
Oh of course, if you're not using it then don't expose it.
I haven't read the code so I can't verify if that's the case here, but I read OPs post as being worried about method clobbering (which is really a non-issue, if the popularity of embedding mutexes shows us anything).
That was the inspiration that made me attempt this same idea 8 years ago, when I was at college. I called it depositorybox, and the idea was people would deposit a message and money to get it higher up the page.
It didn't work and I learned I had to earn money like regular people.
Somebody did set up a website somewhere that allowed users to see if their private key was in the "database". It would jump them to the correct page, and, steal their private key in the process.
I didn't like them potentially stealing my revenue, so I implemented this feature myself. The pluses beside the private key are permalinks.
Thanks for clarifying. Even though you may not have bad intentions, there are several points of failures e.g. server logs falling into wrong hands, man-in-the-middle-attack (using http) etc.
Maybe put a big disclaimer in red on top of every page.
The mutex is only used inside of SetAlive() and isAlive(), they're the only things this need to handle locking and unlocking. You don't want anything external to that calling the methods on RWMutex.