Fellow residents, is search without probable cause acceptable?

Though it's reasonable to apply your real-life privacy expectations to Second Life, you have to remember that some differences in the way that the virtual world works make it impossible to perfectly transfer those expectations.

In the real world, your visual sensors (eyes) are connected to your body. In Second Life, your visual sensors (camera) operate independently of your body (avatar).

As a general rule in the real world, there is an expectation that you are entitled to an expectation to privacy of anything that is hidden from view of someone who is not on your property; however, you have no expectation to privacy of anything that someone could see if they were standing off of your property. Easy rule.

However, in Second Life, your camera can go far beyond your body. Your avatar can be firmly placed in your property, while your camera is off on someone else's. So is privacy invaded base on where the avatar is, or where the camera is? The answer doesn't relate back to real life, because in real life, your eyes and body are in the same place.

In real life, you would have an expectation of privacy to something that you have hidden behind a wall. In real life, normal visual perception cannot go through walls. In Second Life, swinging your camera past a wall is an easy task. So do you have an expectation of privacy to that which is behind walls in Second Life?

These examples of camera use do not take advantage of any special knowledge of coding or gadgets or exploits. My examples use the default camera that is integrated into the Second Life viewer program, using the default controls of the viewer, using methods that are taught as basic in the knowledge base.

I'm not necessarily sure that the specific answers to these problems are really the most important thing. I, and probably most people, are more concerned with the question, "What do I have to do to assure myself of some privacy when I want it?" If swinging the camera past someone else's wall is a normal, default usage, and I have no expectation that someone will not use their camera that way, that's fine as long as I know that and I have some means of blocking it, or some other way I can obtain privacy.

What about a renter's right to terminate a lease at any time for any or no reason? What about a store's right to refuse service to anyone?

Everyone is acting like SL is an RL country but it's not...it's a rental space owned by a private company which trumps most of the privacy freedoms you'd have IRL.

Any privacy you have is what they decide to give you.

Which does not have to be NONE , by the way.

*ejection and banning abilities on land

*mute abilities

*AR abilities

It definitely isn't "none"!

what any of those things has to do with privacy is beyond me.

ejecting and banning only stops them from snooping on you if you live on a private island, and ban them from the whole estate.

Mute abilities doesnt stop them from snooping on you, only hearing them

and If you cant AR someone for snooping then its meaningingless as a protection for protecting your privacy.

However I was mainly refering to the concept of privacy.

People say there is none - Others want privacy. Linden Labs gets to decide. They can take a middle road - there is no law that says they have to agree with the none crowd. Any more that there is no law that they have to agree with those who want privacy protections.

Whoa, am I actually agreeing with you??

Not entirely true, it IS possible to take action against Persons and organizations not of government mandate who Violate your constitutional rights. These actions may be either Criminal Complaints, or civil actions depending upon the type, and severity of the Violation.
Your neighbor, for example is Listening repeatedly through a monitoring device while you are making phone callson a cell, or Cordless phone, and reports the content of the calls to others. This person Has comitted a felony, and the basis for the Law which this person Has broken Is a Constitutional One, The 4th amendment.
Your rights are there Not just to protect you from government, But to protect you from ANYONE who would Infringe upon your basic human Dignity.

Angel.

I'm always amazed that people don't realize that Phillip Rosendale has stated on more than one occasion that he believe that people will do the right things in "a room brightly lit".
Given his stated philosophy the system is designed as such. Are people just not informed or ignoring the facts I still haven't found out. Privacy in SL is not coming anytime soon no matter how many complaints, blogs, letters, etc.

I actually agree with him.

And in a brightly lit room, those who pry into other people's business will be exposed for exactly what it is they are doing.


Copybot does nothing other than grab available data. Well, so does your client program, what's the problem?

Not a lot of difference, save for one. It's what you *do* with that data subsequently that makes all the difference.

The way I see it, copybot users shouldn't be allowed to use your creations, and intruders shouldn't be able to use what they found while snooping.

With significant penalties for both, if either are not done consensually.



Should anyone be allowed to pry into what your products in development look like, who you associate with 24/7, who you are cybering with, or what you said 'off the record'?

If any of that is okay, there's big money to be had sneaking around some of the corporate sims, that's for sure!

Brand new griefer toy. Camera blocking cages ^^

Now you can't even cam out to sit on something. What a great idea THAT is.

What the hell is it with you people and your "rights".

This is a GAME Get over yourselves and shutup and play it, thats all you have to do...

The residents in the Caledon sims collectively spend over 70,000 annually.

That's USD, not $L.

If that's pocket change to you, well, I suppose I can see why you would have the expressed perspective.

For hundreds of residents in my sims, there is a little more at stake than a couple of sticky tokens and some skeeball tickets exchangeable for a neon plastic frog at the pizza counter.

At any rate, that is what's up with me. ^.^

Well if we ever have free elections, I vote for Desmond for President of SL.

I haven't yet visited Caledon. but i will make it a point to. It sounds like a it's m kind of place.

I expect everything I do to be transparent to LL.

I pay actual money for my virtual house. Therefore, what goes on inside=my business. The odd passerby camming in? I don't appreciate it, but probably wouldn't even be aware of it. I certainly can't hope to prevent it.

Self-deputized people whose new sport is camming all over the grid looking for broadly offensive content to AR can fuck off--their behavior should be outed and they should be shunned.

Hhmm. A valid point - up to a point. The trappee still has the options of tp'ing out, or relogging at a different location. Or going non-phys where available and just walking out of the trap.

It should prevent people from looking in, but not looking out. Perhaps a single prim instead of walls, that defines a space where no one can look into without being on the inside; a prim that, once set up, doesn't keep one from targetting other prims inside this prim.

You've done this?

True, Aleister. The camera block feature would only need to be in one direction, like a wall that is alpha-textured and invisible on one side and opaque on the other. Only this one would be for camera-viewing. Computer would only have to be able to draw a straight line from the avatar to the camera position, and just send the avatar's client a texture of the wall when the line intersects a camera-block wall, with a polite little box saying camera view blocked, or somesuch. In fact, it is possible to make surfaces with which objects on the other side are invisible to the viewer that have alpha channels. It would just be necessary to tweak it to invis all objects as well aas stop camera view.

This is sounding downright doable. Anybody with the expertise to write and post a proper JIRA for something like this?