Fellow residents, is search without probable cause acceptable?

I voted that we shoud, but I have no Ilusions that we have any real priviacy from lindens and woud have to take considerable precations aginst other residents to have any real degree of confidence. The fourth admendment is a compromise in the social contract we call our constution that has worked fairly well in the physical world. Recently people have aserted that due to the nature of the internet their is no priviacy and we shoud get over it. While that is one way to adapt to the new medium I think that their is another way which is to mutualy respect others priviacy and agresively ignore and pretend that data obtained from breaching privacy either acidently or on purpose is invalid. It woud be nice if LL took this aproch but the lack of transperency in the AR policies means i have no clue what LL thinks about priviacy

As for me personaly in SL, I tend to monitor the MiniMap a lot and if their are two or three dots in a enclosed area i try to stay back to give them priviacy, or anounce my approch however if i find myself baned from a parcel and the MiniMap indicates no one home i frequently disable cam controls and look around.

Ps a alternive to to removing "disable cam controls" woud to be to simply increase the curents limits and remove the disable option.

Well, I guess the results are largely in.

As imperfect as the poll is, as we approach 100 votes the landslide response seems to say... at least *something* about what the community at large thinks.

Not very scientific, but it still seems that anyone filing an abuse report in an uncalled for, invasive context has seriously and broadly offended the community.



My thanks to all for providing this Resident Answer.


* * * * *

Ah, and yes, turning on the 'view names' feature in a poll about unwarranted search was, in fact, my rather oblique attempt at humour. Ta for now!

Kind of disappointed everybody concentrated on privacy from other individuals in SL and camera controls rather than whether or not they feel violated by Lindens (and possibly police officials) looking in their inventories. Mine's a mess, it would crash any normal computer instantly just trying to find anything, but I haven't seen this issue addressed in this thread (unless I skimmed too fast).

What do you think? Should you expect some privacy in your inventory/pictures/textures/notecards, etc.? Is it illegal for the authorities (FBI, etc.) to come and take your notecards as "Evidence" in a possible case against you?

Can someone provide a link to the following passage presented above, or instructions on how to get to it?



The phrase "Screenshots or video taken without permission" doesn't seem to appear in Google. Is it stored in the secure area of secondlife.com or otherwise prevented from being indexed?

The passage doesn't say screenshots or video taken without persmission "do violate", it says they "might violate", which is pretty much the same as not saying anything at all. Maybe they do, maybe they don't, depends on what mood the person making the judgement is in.

GRRR.

I misread the responses. NO, it is not acceptable for anyone to search my inv.

P2

Between Canada and the USA, there are many similarities, But Canada's protections are not as Far reaching, nor as absolute as the American Counterpart (Look up the "Not withstanding Clause of our constitution). In Britain, they have been Dealing with Domestic terrorism of various sorts for most of the previous century, and their laws reflect that by granting police very far reaching powers of search and siezure. French law is based upon the Napolianic Code Not (British Common Law) where there was no presumption of innocence (a condition that has been changed) but they Also have granted police extremely far reaching powers of search. I have not even touched on the various Asian jurisdictions who's citizens now access SL. The US Model of Constitutional protections is NOT universal.
You are a Fortunate people in many ways but it tends to make you Rather complacent about the application of law in Other countries. Where SL touches other jurisdictions, the police forces of those jurisdictions have a right to Investigate inside SL, and the laws, and protections they will observe while investigating will be of thier country, Not yours.

Angel.

I'd have no objections to LL checking out my inventory and possessions if they were doing so for a good reason - determining that I'm not a scammer or griefer, say. It is their virtual world, they have a right to make sure I'm not trying to crash sims or ruin other people's experience.

I'd be opposed to Lunatics For A SL That Caters To Just Us being able to do so.

~R

True privacy has been proposed as a feature before - check out props 1609 and 2225 among others.

As for removing the option, Disable Camera Constraints - Nooooooooooo! I suspect anyone who is in favour of that option doesn't make much use of Cam controls anyway. I don't know how I managed to build before I used them.

Hear, hear! I agree entirely. I presume that would cover chat logs and transaction history as well. I just hope they don't make a habit of checking my inventory too often.... I'm not that 'exotic' and if they're looking for evidence of dubious practices, they're looking at the wrong person. Then again, no-one's ever taken my word for anything :\ If and when law enforcement agencies knock on LL's door with a warrant to access data on the servers is entirely another matter. It's something I'm none too thrilled about although I can see perfectly valid reasons for it. Leave all the investigations to the professionals (goodness knows, they're cack-handed enough as it is) and give all the amateurs and 'Lunatics For A SL That Caters To Just Us' pressure groups the boot.




Tell me about it! I have a habit of making humungous builds and the amount of time i used to waste just flying around in order to see something i needed to edit amounted to a major waste of time. As with so many useful tools in SL, they also end up becoming part of the greifer's (and snoop's) toolbox It's the person, not the tools that need to be addressed.

A very interesting poll and discussion you've kicked off here, Des. One that is also quite timely.

What type of snooping are you talking about though? People panning into your skybox with your camera? I was under the assumption the OP was referring to LL staff going through your inventory to see if you have anything questionable.

Either way, privacy on the net and in sl just doesn't exist, which is why I would never have anything in my inventory and I would never say anything in chat or IM that could come back and bite me in the ass. Second Life isn't a country, it's a privately run company. We're not entitled to privacy nor should we expect it. LL isn't going to go down for the sake of keeping someone's kinks a secret. I think we should expect and understand why they need to search an inventory and review a chatlog. All of this is available to LL staff when they need it very easily. Your inventory and chatlogs could be being reviewed by an LL staffer as I type this and you would never know it.

I was under the impression the OP meant people looking for Broadly Offensive stuff to report by snooping around in peoples homes and spying on them - then reporting it to Linden Labs.

Linden Labs comes along just on the word of aformentioned snooping prudish busybody, decides its possible that the snooper might have been on to somehting - And seizes the home and property, banning the "offender"

The whole idea of residents "ratting out" other residents stinks to me. I never liked it, and I can see how some bored people are going to see this as carte blanche from LL for running around AR-ing everything. They probably do already though. I bet the abuse team is flooded with nonsense AR's all the time. But ultimately if LL finds something they see fit to seize or delete, that's their perogative.

oops double post

Yeah - that was one of the things I hated about that Blog entry

It was for all intents and purposes Encouraging them to keep it up.

Its interesting how History Influences how laws are passed. Basically England's heavy handed crackdown on Colonial Desent led DIRECTLY to guarantees against search and seizure.

Other countries not having had that experience of course do not have that. And thus their protections less far reaching.

British Political thought has probably influenced more people than the United States has by virtue of its former hugely far reaching empire which continued to expand after the American Revolution.

Still even in the US our protections under the 4th ammendment are not once they were even 20 years ago. Hopefully this will reverse course.

Searching inventories: No. There's no way this should be being done without a good reason. However, if the Lindens wanted to search the *asset database* for an offensive item and purge it from there (which would cause "objects not found" errors when people tried to rez it from inventory), then that would be ok. But if the content is offensive it's offensive regardless of who possesses it.

Searching builds: Yes and no. I agree a lot with free speech and free expression. The problem is that in the real world, there are almost no occasions on which just _hearing_ someone else say something can be a crime or even a suspected crime. On the internet, with laws regulating what you "download", it _can_ be. And although you might say that no court would ever hold you to blame for something you downloaded accidentally, or that was "pushed" to you instead of requested, the problem is that you have to be in court for that to be decided - and if you even go to court for certain charges, child pornography being the obvious one, then your life is already pretty much ruined.

So: yes, I think I should have the right to pan my camera around a sim to see all the data which is being sent to my PC over my internet connection and which I am at least potentially legally responsible for downloading. If I am liable to be blamed, arrested or taken to court, for downloading the details of what you're doing in your house, then I want to be able to know what that is so that I know to get out of there if it's something that might get me into trouble.

Think about it - now that real child porn was found in SL in Germany, there's a good likelihood that the German police could be monitoring connection to SL. That's easy for them to do because they're all to a fixed range of IP addresses. Anyone detected downloading a child porn texture could easily wind up with an officer knocking on their door, and the fact that the texture was only being downloaded to go on a poster hidden in the corner of a locked and secured skybox (which maybe the German downloader didn't even know existed) won't help with that.

HOWEVER - this is only because it's a stopgap for a bad situation. I do think that people should have privacy in their SL homes, and I do think that SL should limit camera motion, but only after they have modified the servers so that your client machine only recieves data on what you can actually see.

Edit to add - This doesn't apply to things like gridwide scanners that are not associated with the avatar actually being in the sim with the content (and thus subject to blame for downloads resulting from such). I think those are pretty much a privacy violation.

Though I think that we should have the right to privacy, the fourth amendment to the US constitution has essentially been nullified by the Patriot Act. In the US we technically no longer have that protection - from individuals we appear to have it, but we no longer have that protection from our government.

The United States Constitution's Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure is a prohibition on the action of the federal and state governments. It has no application to private actors who are not working for the government (e.g., Linden Labs, or a Second Life account holder). A large part of the justification for the amendment is that it's necessary to protect citizen participation in monitoring their own government and electing officials. A citizen may not feel safe to speak out against the incumbent sherriff in an election debate if that sherriff had free reign to harass that citizen.

I think you are exaggerating just a bit. There have been examples of Beaureaucratic Overzealousness definitely. But life for the Average American hasn't changed much. The patriot is flawed, but it's not he Spanish Inquisition reinvented.

Amity, the points about the Constitution have been made over and over, but some will continue to bring it into these arguments even if it has no relevance. And maybe that says a lot about the way we feel about it, we wish we could live our entire lives by it.

In which case, if it's just a private individual snooping on private land, there would be even *more* reason to call that person a peeping tom.



This brings up the question of intellectual property rights too.

Pretend I'm Apple Computer, designing, say, something like the metaversal equivalent to the next generation iPhone in a locked down Apple sim.

Millions of dollars have been spent, and for anyone with access to its look and feel, compatibility standards and features, millions could be made.

Does anyone, by virtue of being a Company employee, have the right to sneak a preview of it for any or no reason at all?

If this sounds outlandish, change the company name to IBM.



Also, how about the Swedish Embassy? Sure, it's tourist info now, but let's think a bit progressively for just a moment here.

Could a German or French investigator access and use *any* information at all in the Swedish sim with *no* repercussions, if some areas were declared private?

Your scenarios are quite possible. And the principles outlined in our constitution would make a great basis for governing SL, no argument there. But some throw the Constitution into the argument as if it has to be adhered to. (Not necessarily you). And it doesn't.

Plus a snooping employee looking at unautorized property of his/her employer would be subject to company policy before they'd be subject to any other laws.

Also, what country in their right mind would put any sensitive info in their SL embassy??

Going into somebody's house with a camera is rude. But if I press a button on my hud, I dunno if it's going to go over a property boundary, so that's kind of hard.

If we're talking about TOS violations with the new policies, if you have to sneak to see something, then I don't think it should count. In a practical sense, despite how horribly they've handled all of this, I don't think Linden wants to encourage a Second Stasi.

The Fourth Amendment may apply only to government intrusion, but that does not let private snoopers off the hook. Private, unwarranted search and seizure is handled under such statutes as burglary, forcible entry, criminal trespass, and whatever statutes are in the book they throw at Peeping Toms and other invaders of RL privacy. The underlying point remains, and the fact that these are criminal offenses in RL only strengthens it: Privacy is an almost universally felt want and need among human beings, and where it is not treated as a right, it ought to be.

The only thing I can say to this whole issue is: "trespassers will be shot on sight, survivors will be shot again."

Also, to get any "real" privacy everyone would have to buy their own Island and make it an "by invitation only" place. Unfortunately that route is expensive.