Private prims and parcels

Another privacy idea...

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-4697

New parcel option: "private".

New prim option: "private", "public", "normal".

Avatars on "private" parcels would not be downloaded from outside the parcel and would render as clouds.

Prims on private parcels would only be downloaded and visible to other parcels if they're designated as "public".

Prims designated as "private" would not be downloaded or visible from across a parcel boundary on any parcel.

Prims whose bounding box crosses any parcel boundary would be forced to be public, so you couldn't grief someone with an undetectable prim.

Voted, with comments and feedback.

i would find it more useful if i could also/instead mark everybody else and all other plots as 'private' and preserve my bandwidth and system resources.

I think this is certainly a more desirable option than the skybox thing so I removed my vote from the other proposal. I've never cared much what folk do in their pads but I have always felt that skyboxes make the Grid a more fragmented or at least less integrated place than it should be.

Potentially really screws up SL photography and just the scenery as a whole, if half your landscape is empty patches with cloud avatars in it.

Funny. Linden Labs feels that proposals like this make the grid more fragmented. Yes, really.

Funny. Linden Labs feels that proposals like this make the grid more fragmented. Like this:

That's why this proposal lets you designate prims as "public", so your house can be "public" and everything inside it "private".

That works so long as people actually bother to use the right settings, rather than just designate everything on their private parcel as private. Given the way many people slap up ban lines, security orbs and so on without thinking, to the great irritation and inconvenience of, among others, aviators, how confident are you they'll be considerate enough make the effort properly to designate their prims so it doesn't spoil the view for others?

Or even just one or two rooms, perhaps. After all, how much of a place needs to be absolutely private? I can understand that some folk might take it too far and make everything invisible but it's still much better than builds floating 3000 metres up in the sky with nothing much to speak of down below anyway.

I think the crux of most arguments about privacy in SL rests on the invasive nature of the camera so we have boring land and everything of interest floating way overhead. By that I mean the best bits of builds and so forth, not what folk are doing in them. Residents do tend to reserve their good stuff for private areas.

I'm lucky enough to live on an island where the neighbours are quite creative and also considerate with their builds. I can't recall running my camera into a single home when anyone was there but it is good to see their trees and maybe a corner of a roof or whatever. It gives the place an atmosphere.

That said, I never fly because the sky is littered with half finished builds and prudish little f@ckpads, some of which are in relatively plain view if I run my draw distance up to 512. It's a real shame.

I think the option of onland privacy would be very popular for residents like myself who like pixel rumpy-pumpy. It actually has an erotic little kick to it. I'd also like to have a private studio where I could work in peace. Much more than voyeurs, I've never liked having folk looking over my shoulder while I work. Hated college. Set up a home studio soon as I could say "ADSL".

This proposal doesn't guarantee a good outcome, it merely makes it possible.

SVC-205 would tend to move all that stuff way up out of the way and hide it from you. That's why I was against it back when the building limit was 768 meters, because it would encourage filling the sky with clutter. Now they can move the junk three miles up it's a win-win situation.

What an awful blight to the land.

How about a separate continent for those who do not wish to participate in the "experience?"

I don't think the selective marking of items and areas would result in a more sparsely populated or apparently empty grid but it will allow residents to tune their parcel or at least a part of it to the level of privacy they desire. I really wouldn't mind most anybody walking around my home so long as I could lock the door of my studio close of any room where I happen to be entertaining a guest, which could be something as innocuous as having a private chat as anything else.

I was wondering if the proposal could be tied into the three tier grading of PG, Mature and Adult? For instance, store owners could mark that BDSM sink plunger or photorealistic skin as 'Adult' and only residents who have selected the 'Adult' option in search would be able to see or interact with the item.

Would people bounce off things/people they can't see? In their 'travels'?

Would unwanted visitors still be able to get in? (Bit disconcerting to be with company - for instance - of any sort - and someone's racing around your house. Funny maybe but still distracting.)

Not sure I want to make myself invisible, or worse, have invisi-avs lurking in the corners that I can't see til they type.

What about people standing around and 'listening' too. Making everything there invisible (what about CTRL ALT T) won't change that.

Also what if the house is invisible, prims are invisible and due to lag, the av is not invisible. Hello world...!

P.S. thanks for trying to solve it though.

If they were on the parcel, they could see it.

This is not a physical access control proposal, this is a proposal for creating privacy. It doesn't replace access controls. Something like the phantom zone proposal would be another solution for access control as well, but harder to implement.

I agree, that's why I suggested that avatars appear as clouds.

control alt T won't show anything, these objects aren't transparent, they're simply not there as far as the client is concerned. Chat privacy is another proposal, already on the jira, I don't know the number.

The server won't send avatar information other than position to the client, period, so unless lag is so bad avatars are ghosted that's not possible... and ghosted avatars would just show up at the parcel edge running whatever animation they were running when they entered the parcel.

I guess this refers to something to make banlines less useful, but to that end, you might still want to add some things..
-Avatars and objects set to private on these parcels will not be rendered for residents entering these parcels, unless the owner granted them permission to get them on their client, either through land or group permissions.

The reason is quite simple: people setting these permissions will (generally) want privacy. People entering a plot will simply want to pass through, or just see the things they saw when they decided to enter the parcel more closely.

However, rendering the whole place to whoever enters the parcel will negate the privacy, which was the reason why the permission was set in the first place.
So effectively, it would not negate the need some people feel for generic banlines.
This is why it should include some group-settings, and possibly also "allowed to see" list setting.

If a wall is set to "private", then simply allow those without permission to see it to move through, so it can't be abused either. People can still leave the outer walls, roof and floor of their houses visible, so people just passing through can steer clear from it. They just won't see anything inside that is set to "private".
Basically, this makes the outer walls of a house or skybox a visible "boundery box", while that which is inside is "private space".


But, I can't stress enough, that key in this idea is to NOT send any data for objects and avatars set to "private" AT ALL to those without the correct permissions. It only requires an alternative viewer to render these anyway regardless of settings if the data is still streamed to the client, making this a very useless permissions.
On top of that, simply "setting to invisible" while still sending the data to the client also negates the very welcome side effect: the lag reduction caused by not sending data at all.

Except that if it's at the edge of the parcel, or anywhere on a small parcel and they are flying, they will bump into it before it rezzes.

That, and...

For the same reason we'll never see parcel-controlled visual muting and parcel-level windlight settings, this idea will not fly with LL. It is not desirable to have the scene suddenly change as you move about.

This isn't about banlines at all. This is about providing privacy. Access controls like banlines are not a privacy tool, they're orthogonal to this proposal.

For example, you could subdivide your parcel and only make the portion that's inside your house "private". People passing through your garden wouldn't see the Geiger painting of rotting fetuses on your living room wall even if you left the curtains open or they cammed inside the house.

So unless you're deliberately trying to freak people out, you'll leave the outside walls flagged public so people can see them, right?

So, what happens when you have a visitor?

You've used this trick to tag your parcel as Private, and you've made your sex bed, and all the BDSM furniture, and even your own personal prim "bits" "private". And supposedly your hair, and prim skirt, and high heeled shoes?

And then you TP a friend over to visit. And from outside, you can't see HIM, but you do see his prim hair, his prim belt, his prim shoes, and his prim < ahem! >.

It would seem better to me to tie what is invisible to a group membership (based on the tag you have on at the moment), so for example, anyone in my Private Play group, when on my property, as well as anything attached to them, is invisble while they are on the "private parcel". No matter what prim attachments the add or remove.

But then also, since parcels are from zero to infinity, with no vertical partitioning, what if the Privacy was only to be in the skybox? So you set the things inside the skybox as "Private", leave the shell "Public"... and everyone who wanders through the parcel at ground level vanishes to those outside the parcel?

When an avatar is not downloaded, neither are the prims on that avatar.

They would appear as clouds, like any other undownloaded avatar.

That could get really wierd then. If I wanted to set up a parcel that would allow a skybox over my beach to be private, then anyone who walks on the beach below the skybox would be seen as clouds by anyone outside the parcel? Even though the beach needs no restrictions?

I think we would be better off with one of the other proposals that uses some volumetric method to mark off the private space, such as a special prim property that makes a "privacy prim" phantom, invisible and applies the privacy restriction to the volume occupied by the prim. That could be limited in effect only to your bedrooms and other private spaces, while not screwing around with a 4096 M or higher column of space over the parcel.

Yeh. This is not intended as a perfect solution: Linden Labs keeps shooting down the perfect solutions. It's supposed to be a less intrusive and cheaply implemented solution that they might accept.

For example, volumetric proposals ignore the performance impact of all the extra intersection tests sims would have to do to build the interest list.

this will result in what, seeing avatars getting jiggy on nothing and exposing them to full view?

Perhaps I dont understand it but it seems it might results in some privacy invasion as well, setting yourself to private then sneaking up on people ...

I dunno maybe I just dont understand.

No, it will result in you seeing nothing of the avatar from outside the parcel but a cloud where the avatar is.

Avatars don't get the option of setting private, since an avatar is neither a prim nor a parcel.