Private but Polite

There seems to be a lot of grumbling lately about No Entry barriers and security orbs, in part because people are running into them on their way from here to there.

I think there are few people in SL who believe there should not be some privacy measures, but I think most people also would like to see such systems be less obtrusive for the "good guys".

I'd like to start a low-gripe discussion here about the options available. Maybe we can come up with good solutions that people can use now and perhaps practical measures LL can implement in future versions of SL.


- Lavanya

I'm starting to create skyboxes that I'd like to make private. Sadly, the No Entry barriers don't extend high enough for most skyboxes. The obvious answer of extending the no-entry barrier limit skyward is probably not a great answer.

Personally, I think it would be nice to make it so you can indicate the minimum and maximum height for the no-entry box on your parcel. You could, for example, keep your ground level store open to the public while putting a barrier around your skybox residence.


- Lavanya

Security orbs that TP you to home are neat, but annoying and disorienting. I think anyone building one should consider adding in a warning and delay mechanism. For example, if you fly into range, the orb will IM you that you have 5 seconds to leave or you will be TPed home.

One interesting benefit of this approach is that it makes it possible for someone to quickly fly through a parcel instead of having to go around it.

I'd also recommend people with these things put bouys to mark the protected areas, like navigational beacons. It would be nice if someone would come up with a simple but clear bouy for this and made it freely available to everyone for mass dissemination.


- Lavanya

5 seconds is way to short. I would recommend a minimun of 30 seconds.

And it would even be better that after those 30 seconds it doesn't push or tp you home automaticly, but gives the owner/operator the option to do so. The person can then look on the minimap and see if you are trying to leave or not.

pasted from a different topic;

I would like to see land locking removed totally and replaced with area/item locking.
If you want privacy lock your house or 1 particular room, not the 8k plot its sitting in.
This can carry though for outdoor pools, chairs, boats etc.
Lock them at item level instead of land level.

This would also be nice for other land options like no fly, no script, no build etc. Make your shop no fly and the land outside no build etc

Of course, it would be ideal to be able to create arbitrary regions for no-entry, but the geek in me says that's a big leap from what LL already has.

Right now, it's basically a flag on a parcel. Adding a lower and upper limit would still fit the model pretty well. The main change would be support for the bottom plane's exclusion; the top one is already implemented to stop you from dropping down into the region.

As for arbitary regions, you can consider splitting up your parcel as some people do so you can have a public parcel and a private one. Since the prim limits are shared across parcels on the same sim, you don't lose much.

Still, arbitrary boxes would be cool, especially if you could define them on the fly in script. llAddMeanNastyRegion().

30 seconds is long enough to lose your privacy. I could understand 10, though. Shouldn't take longer than 10 seconds to cross most of a sim.


Not practical when the owner is not around. And dialogs only work within chat range.

Might be nice to get a dialog of toys when someone enters, but on the other hand, that can get spammy in a busy area. On the other hand, it can be a way to instantly grant access without the need for a notecard or chat commands. Imagine "Allow Now" and "Allow Forever" buttons as a way to manage an in-memory access list.

When the owner or anyone else is not around then who cares?

i understand people want to be able to roam and/or fly freely but that is not always possible and yes it would be nice to be able to lock one room down if people were not able to use camera view to get in there anyways but because of a few bad apples people will always lock down some areas.

Case in point..my first area of land i ever rented..first night in there enjoying some private cuddling time with a friend and within 30 minutes someone was standing on the border of the land using camera view to scroll in and see what we were doing then sending me nasty im's for sitting on a cuddle sofa with a demon

after that i made sure i got larger parcels of land put my house in the middle as best i could and locked the land down or used sky boxes that couldnt be found whenever possible

....to many times ive logged in to find people doing things on my furniture or been sitting in my yard enjoying time with friends and had people just rudely walk in and make themselves at home without so much as a *knock knock* that confirms i should have locked the land down

it is because of incidents like that for me and many others that we want ban heights raised and all sorts of things implemented to protect our privacy and comfort levels in sl

On some plots, 5 seconds is too long. 6 seconds is the shortest time it can be reliable on my scripted orb - and its what I use. It does it automatically, because I have a 'slight' issue with people being around my skybox. Even when I'm not home - after all I don't leave my rl home doors unlocked when I'm not there.

I do. Agaian, I don't leave my rl doors unlocked when I'm at work. Do you? Judging by this quote, yes, you do. After all, if you're not around, who cares, right?

That's a very good question, which nobody has been able to answer.

because i do not like logging in to find people using my home and my furniture and yes it has happened to me and many other people i know

Did you ever consider talking to them and perhaps making new friends, or asking them politely to leave? This is a community after all.

Well then once you logged on your ban lines and security scripts would kick back in and they'd all be ejected.

Tada' .. problem solved

But people don't like having to deal with other people.

A large percentage of the SL playerbase log in, sit in their own home surrounded by banlines and security sytems to keep everyone else out, then tp in their few friends to sit down and talk or whatever.

Completely, utterly, totally missing the point of Second Life.

It's a sad, sad situation when people playing an online game go out of their way to avoid having to deal with other people.

Lewis

exactly

Jarod often tells me that Second Life is a scam is the sense that it fools people into believe that they own property, prims, textures, avs et al when we don't. Those things are all so many bytes on a hard drive and the in sole possession of Linden Lab.

It's also wrong, though perhaps not a definitive scam, to convince people that Second Life affords them any sense of privacy at all. Anonymity perhaps, but not inworld privacy. Do Not believe that security scripts and access lists prevent people from seeing what you have rezzed over the land mesh. That's simply not true. It's not at all true. It will never be true.

Your "property" is public domain just like your browsing habits and email. Please Please Please understand that before you find yourself compromised.

lewis is my hero

on many occasions when i have caught people yes i have and you know what i got in return...f*** you lady we will screw where we want when we want our sim went down and we used your house instead or we dont have a house and yours was open or if i can find a way to break in ill break in and your just sitting in your yard with friends ill f***** sit here if i want to

yes i was polite as polite as i could be

i had one friend that logged in to find people screwing in her house almost every afternoon and then found out they had been doing it for months she now locks her land and has a security orb just in case because to her it was unnerving that people were roaming thru her house and on her things

i have a ton of friends i am very newb friendly i hand out free items and have helped many newbs with items and L and even helped them get jobs and taught them to build and make things but there is a point to my niceness when i ask someone to leave and they dont or they get rude my niceness is over especially when they have invaded my privacy

You don't leave your doors unlocked in RL so to avoid people stealing your stuff. No one can steal your stuff from your parcel in SL so this reasoning is fallacious.

Personally, I find security scripts repulsive. I can understand why some people feel they might need to use them, but I believe most of these scripts go way too far.

-Ghoti

At this point, with the tools available to us, there is only one option if you want a location in SL that really offers privacy. And that is to buy an entire Island sim, keep it discontiguous with any other sims, like at least two sims away from anything else, and make it 'private/no entry' when you want privacy.

Anything else at this point can still be spied on. Skyboxes, underground builds, it makes no difference. Someone can still hover outside your controlled area and get visual access. We live in glass houses - and anyone can look through the walls.

What we need is some form of control that can make a specific volume of space impossible to render or interact with from outside the boundries of that space. Then you could make a skybox or a basement or a bedroom in a ground level house, and be assured that when you 'shut the door', no one outside can bother you or see what you are doing. Do *that*, and you could drop the age requirement for most areas, because a walled-off area would actually have some privacy, and adult activities could be conducted in private.

So you Freeze them and then send them home. The easy answer beats the drama.

-Ghoti

....missing the point of YOUR Second Life... not THEIRS!
Each of us plays the game the way WE want to. Personally, I dont want anybody in my house using my stuff that I havent implicitly invited.

This is how *I* play Second Life.

problem is not solved they should not have been in my private home without permission to begin with

while you are at work do you want people in your house screwin on your bed or eating your food or on your computer?