Is it legal to gather information in SL.

This thread is in response to another thread where I stated I was gathering information about banned persons in SL. This seems to be somewhat controversial and for whatever reason I do not understand. The lists of persons that are allowed to access properties or persons who are banned from the properties are available to anyone. It always has been. This thread I hope will bring out both sides of what seems to be more of an ethical issue than one of a legal stance.

Can you provide a URL or link please to where this list is available?

-Atashi

No.

Right, since people reading this thread will not have the background of WHY this thread was started.

My request was more, "Can we be provided more information on HOW the information was gathered?" And others have asked for links to the apparently publicly displayed information.

Note: I don't care one way or another about my ban list being scanned. I just wanna know how it's being done.

i wanna know how and definately wanna know why?

i understand people can come on the land and look at the ban list but to me making up some list of who has who banned is just wrong

You would have to talk to the scripter (Day OH) about his script. If he wants to release any proprietary information that would be up to him.

It's legal. But subject to misuse if you don't understand it.
The current ban list have alot of problems. One ban list I know of is ran behind the scene by a griefer group. They but some real griefer accounts on the ban list, (after all they created them, and they are throw away accounts anyway) to make the list look legitimate , but they also put people on the list who have given them problems and no one else and using it as a griefing tool.

please quit avoiding the questions

what do you need this list for?
why do you need this list?

just because you can go to peoples land and look at a ban list doesnt make what you want to do right

So then it's not publicly available to anyone, is what you're saying? Was it discovered through some hacking around, maybe something that wasn't supposed to be public but wasn't protected very well?

Or is it, as others have surmised, simply data polled by a bot that teleports around the grid 'looking' at banlists? That is something that we can understand, since bots are already crawling the grid looking at other things.

-Atashi

Why do you buy property? Why did you choose the friends that you have? I want to know.

As long as it is legal the reason people do things in SL only matters to the person doing it.

just because something is technically legal still doesnt make it right
if you are going to scan our info on our land it matters to us

i chose my friends because of fun and trust and sharing similar likes or dislikes and i dont buy property i rent

I have supplied all of the information that I am going to. It is now open discussion.

Without your motive, it is impossible to discuss. Maybe if you are using the wrong motive it will lead you to being placed on blacklists as well?

Well, can you answer this:

Does it use a bot account?

Reason I ask, this is going to be the meat of the real ethics issue for quite a few people. As you said, one can simply click the about land and see the list, even if you are banned from the property or not.

Bots, when used improperly, can be resource hogs, which affects SL performance. Take the land sale search feature, for example. There were/are bots hammering that particular feature until it would start crawling and even crashed, before LL did a wee bit of streamlining. These bots should have fallen under the ToS for the resource issue, but I don't know if they did or not as far as LL was concerned.

Other bots, such as store models, can be useful features of limited scale and thus wouldn't fall under the ToS.

Another issue with this whole concept is regarding the ability to opt in or out. Some people do want their privacy in SL and would rather not be scanned for anything that they can avoid. I can't say I blame them, since I have my areas of "Grrr, I want out," it's just that my ban list isn't one of them.

I will state my motive one more time. The reason I am gathering this information is for analyical purposes. I want to find the ratio of the banned people to the average number of people online. this is a project that deals with RL vs SL. I am a college student and this is a sociology project. I wont go into it any further than that. I also stated that people are banned for any number of reasons and that being banned does not imply that any person is a griefer of a trouble maker. SL is however a very powerful tool for gathering situations that mirror RL.

Well then I would consider you collecting this information and using it for your personal benefit, without the express consent of the land owner, to be unethical.

you're nosey.

I already posted a RL world example on the other thread, but two that make sense in SL:

1) Land ownership is public information, simply right-click on the land, "About Land" and see who owns it.

Creating a bot to crawl the grid to see which parcels "Random Resident" owns across the grid is no longer "ethical" (in my personal opinion) because even though you only used public information, the filtered end result of your datamining is not public information by any means.

(No different in looking for all parcels across the grid where "Random Resident" is banned from)

2) A group can have open enrollment and the group members' list is public information to anyone who is a member of the group, however the group owner can choose to mask the member list from anyone that's not a member.

You could have a bot join every open enrollment group it finds, extract the list of group members and then compare the results to the groups on their profile to create a list of avies who choose to hide a group on their profile.

Again, you're using nothing but generally available information, but what you end up with is definitely not public information. And yes, you could stumble onto it by accident, but again that's a far cry from having an automated bot do it.

I suppose you could use Libsl to create a bot to go look at folks' parcel banlists, and save them off to a database somewhere. However, since the in-world parcel banlist doesn't log *REASONS* why people were banned, the information collected would be rather useless.... not to mention bordering on irresponsible if you didn't have the landowner's consent.

Something similar to what you're referring to is already available, in a system called BanLink. http://www.slbanlink.com

The difference is, landowners *choose* to feed their banlist up to BanLink, not the other way around. Once they do, they're allowed to check boxes & 'honor' bans from any number of other locations they choose.

For those banned, BanLink is one-stop-shopping to do a search on where they're banned, and log a dispute against if, if they choose.

BanLink is a free service, and is targeted for high-traffic mainland locations and/or full-sim estates. It is not intended for residential locations just looking for privacy. More details on how it works can be found here: http://meratalk.com/?p=304

In RL, walking down the street, anyone can see me- look and examine me. If a stranger started taking pictures of me, I'd have to control my urge to whack him one. Even if there's no privacy in SL, people would still like to think no one's scanning them or their property... Hence the reluctance in answering your questions

usually people who spy on and stalk people keep it a secret. in retrospect, that's probably how this should have been handled.

Legal? Yes but you should run it by your schools ethics comity.
Is the information publicly available? Yes
Should the information be publicly available? No consensus, only opinions.

Simple solution:
Have a new checkbox added that hides the ban & access lists from public view.

Personally I don't care if people scan my ban list.

Now if it were scanning poseballs then I would be concerned.

What is your hypothesis regarding how banning in SL correlates with RL? I'm interested in hearing this, but I don't see the RL equivalent.

Comparing to how many RL places ban Gorean Masters and Furries. Not to mention giant robots, crabs, and pie.

I can't see how it would be illegal or against TOS to gather the info for yourself from 'about land' ban lists etc., but as soon as you attempt to make such collected info public, it probably would be illegal and against TOS.