Electric Sheep Company's Searchbot Answers Go Here.

Because of historical assumptions and behaviour, and due to some quirks in the SL system itself, there is likely content listed that shouldn't be for sale. That's one issue. A new sudden change in the paradigm.

People are worried about that. They're also worried about the way that "no privacy in SL" is being demonstrated to them right up in the face. But that's only the 0.1% who read this forum of course. There are a lot of people out in SL who are going to feel like someone's been in their house rifling through all their drawers when they find out, because that's basically what is happening. It's humiliating and upsetting to a lot of people to have their (considered to be) private spaces violated. Laughing at them and telling them they were stupid to think they had any right to privacy isn't exactly the most sympathetic behaviour, and doesn't reflect very well on those who are wallowing with glee in the schadenfreude.

The tool may be designed to list objects for sale, but the question still remains whether it harvests data on everything with your name on it. Certain ways that kind of system could be used to grief you have already been suggested.

No stone unturned.

Well said Ace -

They do actually collect all of your Object data from what has been said (by Electric Sheep) - but dont do anything "bad" with it according to Forsetti.

Objecting to them collecting all this data on you will get you shot down on the forums though.

Objecting to them collecting the data on EVERYONE got me accused of wanting all of SL made over my way.

Its easier to flame on the forums than consider the possibility that automating and collecting object data on everyone is different than wandering SL and this data being streamed to your veiwer.

Its a difference of scope, its a difference of scale, and its a difference of intent.

Why can't people who believe its wrong what they are doing encourage there friends to stop using the company?
I won't use them again for various reasons be if I am seller or buyer.
We can't change what they are doing but we can with our pocket books.
If people don't buy from Electric Sheep, they have to change how they do things if they want people to buy from them.
It seems pretty awful that instead of having people go to them on there own that they have some how persuade the Lindens to allow them to find the sellers without there consent.
I wouldn't want to sell anything with them when I start selling.
If they are selling products of mine without my consent aren't they violating my copyrights?
Well we don't have to buy, if you got something for sale that is only for 1 person why not make land access only to those you know.
I realize some services or friends sale things for 0 for one person when there is building projects and especially someone new who doesn't know how to even find item in ones inventory or put the peices together so its easier way to assist someone.
Can the bots go through access bans? I often have my teammates sale things to me for zero but seldomly its sits there for long and if it is land access is restricted and
I have never experienced a sale bot every buy a thing from me or was meant for me.
Yet still I don't like the place been there few times, never came back.
And if they are doing this perhaps more people are doing the same and they need more people to sell items to get there friends come buy stuff.
Is it possible to just find away to get enough people to Boycott them for copyright enfringement with there bots or something related. Is this possible?

I think there's two cases where that's not quite right.

One is an SL bug that caused things to be marked as for sale without the owner knowing it. I don't know the details here; I think that it's been fixed but the fix didn't change things that had been inadvertently marked as for sale - it just didn't set new things as for sale. Anybody got a link to the history of this issue?

The other is that putting things down for sale at L$0 seems to be a convenient way for builders to pass big things off to their clients. I'm not sure I buy that - why not just drop it in their profile - but that's what people have said.

Baiscally you can build the building - which often is too big to link as one piece. The you can sell it IN PLACE where it is and the new owner doesnt need to do anything but buy it and use it.

When its a whole sim - its the same thing.

This includes building - and also when you decorate a build.

It is true, however, doing this without restricting access to the sim was always a bad idea. Also- whenever Ive done it I sell it with the buyer standing right there, in case some other idiot WITH access buys it by mistake.

Still - some people felt protected by being anonymous on the grid - The Searchbot changed how anonymous they were with no warning.

It's still there as of 09:16am PDT today:

If you're on the mainland or any sim the general public can access, the search bot can scan your items. The items for sale that were scanned on a parcel I watch over, were actually scanned from a different parcel and listed as if they were on that different parcel.

So I don't believe banning the bot will help you at all if you're on the mainland. You can just be scanned from a neighboring parcel. ESC does provide an opt-out process, but you have to be in-world to do it. If multiple people rezz items on your land, they all have to opt-out.

I also wonder if the tool would be all that helpful to a legitimate merchant when the items were listed as being on a different parcel. That would make things hard to find. The bot seems to be recording whatever parcel it is in when it finds the item, rather than the parcel the item is actually in. If they could reprogram the bot to list only items for the parcel it is actually in, bans would work and results would be accurate, but I suspect if that was technically feasible it would have already been implemented.

Okay, I need more coffee. Hope this is of help. I still await ESC's answers.

Disclaimer: the views expressed in this email have nothing to do with the fact that I've consulted with ESC before. I'd say the same thing - and will say - about the next SL based search engine that pops up to crawl through publicly available information. On to my irrelevant opinions!
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Did you opt-in to Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all having photos of your house from above? Did you opt-in to have shopping aggregate sites slurping up your eBay listings (like Froogle, PriceRate)? Do they even offer opt-out options?

No, they don't.

Search engines fed by spiders are crawlers must be opt-out by their nature, and this is only looking for items specifically set for sale (earlier items being picked up were rare, and a bug). They'd be completely useless as opt-in.

Google's mission is to index the world's public information.

The mission of this project is to index the virtual world's public information.

Regards,

-Flip

I think the disconnect is:

Not only do many of those on the status quo side of the argument state that everything on your private land is "Public" Information

They want it that way.

Its not just "well thats how it has to be"

As long as no one is interested in even hearing many players' privacy concerns. Its always going to come off as technical-minded smugness.


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If the searchbot is so justifiable - why bother even letting people opt out?

Id be interested in knowing the basic reaction Residents would have if the Searchbot - Including exactly how it gets its information - was made widely known in SL.

I hate doing a me too post, but this pretty much sums up what I think about it. I think the biggest problem here is that people look at what SL is completely differently. I see it as a 3-d web. Just like on the normal web, anything I place up on my land is meant to been seen by the public. Unless I place it on a private section of a site (or a private, restricted, section of the grid) I have no expectation of privacy. I find the search bot useless to me because there is so little listed on it. If it could include vendors, maybe I would use it.

As for the opt-out, Google, Yahoo!, etc. all have opt-out functions on them too. You don't want your page listed, you have to opt out of the search engines, or place a file on you site to tell the robot to not index the site. It really doesn't seem that different then what ESC does.

The search services above access websites that have posted themselves on the Web. that means they want to attract visitors and they want to be on search.

As you god-damn well know, people on SL are not necessarily eager at all to have their underwear advertised to everyone in the world.

You are clever, and at least you are semi-honest enough to declare your conflict of interest. Credit to you for that much ethical sense. But this is not intelligent - which is different from being clever.

As for the third-party revelations of your personal data you list, okay, that is a question well worth considering. And certain national governments have taken up that issue.

But we are not talking about the location of someone's house, which is public record from the day they buy it. We are talking here about people who come to SL to play out issues that matter to themselves - sometimes deeply personal issues - on the presumption that they will be anonymous and that their in-world data will not be displayed to everyone who will pay ESC or some other crumb-bum a price.

So how much did ESC pay you to post this? I am curious: I want to know at what price you will be a whore for money. If you don't want to answer, that is your right. If you don't, it is the right of everyone to conclude that your price for your personal integrity is - peanuts.

"Respectfully" awaiting your reply,

Har Fairweather

But LL doesnt market Second Life as the 3D web - they market as a Virtual World, complete with Land Ownership.

And the buy-in costs to get an actual Private, Restricted Part of the grid are prohibitively high for most Residents.

Got a link to where they say you can have 'private' land on anything but an island?

Ill correct my post - I meant it in the sense of Private property - which many people think they are getting.

Here is a post from the "previous thread" - Automated Burlary - intended to summariaze the main issues.

Originally Posted by Kyrah Abattoir
Well to take their defense I do not feel like i have to ask permission either to make data mining.


Hi, Kyrah, welcome to the thread. Actually, your observation about whether you "have to ask permission" is not so much a defense of ESC as a partial explanation of why there is a problem in the first place. A problem, by the way, that reaches far beyond ESC and its malignant little searchbot.

If a would-be data miner did "have to ask permission" there would be no problem here. Any problems would be strictly between the miner and the people who gave permission.

In the present case ESC released a searchbot in-world essentially scanning avery Resident-made object in it and collecting those where the "for-sale" box was checked. ESC then posted these with landmarks set right in front of each object on a website separate from SL and LL, claiming it was a search service for in-world buyers. ESC did all this not only without asking anyone's "permission" but also WITHOUT NOTIFYING THE OWNERS OF THE OBJECTS. As a result, owners found themselves relieved of valuable objects from inside their homes and properties for nominal or zero prices by unscrupulous people when the owners were innocently unaware that the for-sale box was checked, or were builders using a workaround that had been safe common practice for years and had suddenly and without warning made them vulnerable. ESC's response to complaints about this effect was profound contempt and condescension - and for quite some time not the slightest inclination to fix or remove this bot. (And by the way, the bot cannot read the contents of vendor devices, so misses maybe 90% of the objects legitimately for sale in SL; it is almost useless for its stated function.) Whether by accident or design, the result was not merely data-mining, but predatory data-mining, and from the moment ESC knew about this effect, consciously predatory. It is evident that from their point of view, The Electric Sheep Company are the meatpackers, and we Residents are their sheep. One ESC officer has been quoted in a publication as speculating about "life-logging," meaning basically tracking every move an avatar makes as well as every object it owns or disposes of. I will leave it to your imagination what other harmful (to Residents) uses spybots could be put to by exploitive or malicious people. I have thought about it, and some of the possibilities would have a deeply chilling effect on interest in SL by individuals and businesses alike. Some of the possibilities are just plain chilling.

For us, the questions now are, what can or should LL do about the problem ESC's actions have exposed, and what can or should the Community Standards be to deal with the possibly predatory use of spybots, and what can or should Residents do to deal with what many see an unwarranted and harmful intrusion into their SL lives and sense of privacy, and what can or should "privacy" consist of in SL, and how can such privacy be guarded?

For LL, there are other questions, such as, should they be allowing outside entities to be making such dubious use of data on LL servers which LL, after all, legally owns, and which might someday actually have monetary value to marketers and others? And, at what point might LL lose the legal right to control their own data through failing to take action to assert and protect control?

As you see, Kyrah, there is a lot here for intelligent people to work on; a lot of questions about SL that need intelligent answers. I hope you will help work toward those answers.

Googlebot iterates over your site and both indexes and stores an exact, reproducable copy. Any in-world spiderbot would hence have to be a combination of both searchbot and copybot.

Anyone who thinks the analogy between searchbot and webspiders holds, please formally announce that you will have no problem whatsoever with a copybot indexing your prims/textures/creations, nor the fact that they can reproduced at will by a third party without seeking any kind of permission from you, nor would you think of filing a DMCA any more than you would for any webspider that archives/caches your site on demand and only then you can truly with a straight face claim that the analogy fits.

Any statement including a "but..." to the above means that you can't compare the web to SL and your analogy was flawed in the first place.

I see the search bot the same way I see froogle. Froogle does not make copies of the items that it list for sale, it just tells you were the items are listed for sale. It says "Look here, item X is for sale at $Y"

I don't see the searchbot as an issue, as I see the need for a "trade" function for people to give items for other items or land to another person. But that is a different topic.

Haven't used Froogle myself. Does it post items the "seller" didn't intend to post for public sale? Does it allow a transaction to then take place without approval of the seller?

No? I thought not.

If not, then Froogle is not like the ESC spybot at all.

Thanks! That makes it even less evil, IMO, since it is simply metadata about items, and NOT the actual items themselves.

The analogy fits because it is an opt-out information indexing service which works by crawling over the publicly-accessible World Wide Web gathering the information it WANTS for its intended purpose. The fact that that SheepBot doesn't ALSO archive ALL of the information is irrelevant. I certainly have never claimed that SheepBot and Google were identical in their missions and practices; simply that they were analogous, which does NOT mean they have to be identical, contrary to your misinterpretation of the word.

For your edification: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/analogous

You'll get plenty of privacy if you don't mark anything for sale on your land that you don't want sold.

It's no different if someone walks by your land, notices an item by chance, is interested in it, clicks on it to see who created it, and notices it's for sale. I do that all the time!

If you dont' want strangers on your land then set group permissions.

You bring up my other point, isn't everything in SL that is listed for sale, listed for public sale? There really is no things as a "private" sale in SL. Unless you drop an item directly to someone, or set up a vendor to give the items to someone, then anyone can come by and buy it for whatever price you have it listed for. The only thing that the search bot tells you is where items that are listed for sale are. It does nothing more.

As Brenda has posted - the Searchbot's range exceeds that of one parcel. It can scan your parcel without standing on it.

As Forsetti has basically admitted - it searches you items even if they are not for sale and stores the data. It doesnt provide that date to anyone, they dont "do anything bad" with it. "Dont do anything with it" he also said.

Its the for sale items that are displayed. Unless you opt out. With some exceptions made as the result of complaints.

I think the idea is that if something is marked for sale, and it's not in a strip mall, or plastered with obvious marketing material, or otherwise presented in some way to make it clearly intended for general purchase, we're supposed to know better than to buy it, because doing so would be rude.

Of course, educating our newbies to understand this subtle point of etiquette is going to be just as hopeless as expecting bots to become mind readers able figure out what the seller intended.

I can see into other people's parcels without standing on them. I could walk down one of the many roads and just happen to turn around with my camera zoomed out enough to catch a look inside a house that's 20m away from me. From my understanding these bots don't have any special visibility that an av doesn't have.




Big deal. Are you really that concerned that someone that doesn't know who you really are knows you have a sex bed in your SL house? What's the worst that could happen? They post on their site that you have a sex bed? If anything you'd just get "cool how much was that?" IM every once in a while.

I really think this is just being alarmist for being alarmist's sake.

I don't buy it (pun intended).

If you have a sign on your lawn chairs in your front yard that says "take one!" then you can't expect the taker to know that it wasn't really meant to be given away.

Don't rely on other people to take care of your own business. Don't make it for sale. If you want to give the item to one person specifically then drag the item from your inventory onto their profile.