What Does Privacy Mean in SL? What Should It Mean?

And you accuse me of spin? Sigh.

Still waiting for an answer to my previous post on this thread...

"Astonishing dishonesty on the part of ESC's apologists"

Wow. You're off the hook, Har. And quite possibly off your rocker as well

Oh cripes I can't even remember. I have a niggling feeling it was a comment on Robin's office hours. Maybe I set the hares running unintentionally. But look at it this way, LL wants to push all the third party forums etc anyway so I think it's only a matter of time before "can't disclose in SL" becomes "can't enforce nondisclosure in SL because it'll be all over the popular forums anyway"

What are you hiding?! Show me! Show the sheeps! Or something.

Har, if you choose the debug option "character-> show look at" you'll see a variety of colored cross-hairs according to where avatar view focuses may be. If you're alone with one other person and you see three crosshairs in the immediate vicinity, you can be sure you're being spied on. If you can't see cross hairs, you may still be being spied on- you'd be surprised what you can do with a long draw distance, disabled camera constraints and a knack with both the alt-cam and the on-screen camera controls

"All land is public" needs to be on a megaprim in orientation island, seriously. People think land access lists mean privacy, when what they're really like in web terms, is a public forum with "you must register to post", rather than what a lot of people wish they were, which is a "you must log in to see this part of the site at all- so googlespider/random visitor you can't look in here".

We don't have personal SL servers, outside of very expensive private islands. Mostly we have to make do with the big public grid. A LOT of people have demonstrated that they want to have some kind of private shared space over the metaverse with their personal friends or online intimates. I think it's been mentioned as "possible" to have some way of just not rezzing items, avatars or chat on parcels in certain conditions. It's just not a priority. If enough people yell, it might be, but you're not going to get the unwashed masses onto JIRA, just the technical types and strongly political idealists.

As long as SL is developing, and we're potentially at the early days of the online metaverse, we have a right to talk about these issues and try to steer the future development to whatever will hopefully be the best compromise for everyone. We don't have to accept the status quo, and we don't have to take the exit clause either. We can raise the issue in debate.

My first JIRA proposal will be a button on every avatar's profile that gives you the logs of all their IM conversations for the last week. I'm sure I could monetize that somehow, and it'd be progress!

Thanks for the helpful post, Ace. Navigating client menu>character>show look at provides a useful option: You can know when your av is being watched by whomever (I bet it's a must-have among combat sim users!).

"Camera constraints" seems like another area to look at. Do you know much about it?

Thanks for the clarification, Ace! I'll have to check that out.

Heh, the irony is that in some cases you may have more privacy on the mainland than a (public accessible) private sim. Purely down to the fact that most peoples' computers would have a fit on the mainland with 512m draw. I used to keep an eye on the public area of an island I co-managed from my sky office using 512 draw distance, though.

Crosshairs:

gray- not focusing on anything, usually you'll see this a little way in front of the avatar, maybe it'll move around as they mouse around their HUD/UI
blue- avatar is responding to chat (head turns, crosshair goes blue)
green- avatar has their mouse icon over the object such that they'd be getting a mouse-over text
pink- avatar has chosen this spot as their alt-cam focus point (seems a bit off with linked builds etc right now)
peach- avatar is editing or otherwise poking around with the object.

It's something like that, anyway. Beware pink crosshairs!

All of which brings up a WHOLE NEW privacy issue - what about the rights of peeping toms to do their peeping undetected?

Only if they get the proper Media Credentials......

In my humble opinion, the evolving nature of SL means the TOS and imposed rule set must evolve as well. What is possible in SL today might not have been considered when the rules were written yesterday. Rules from RL may or may not apply, and in many cases there is no clear RL precedent since SL makes 'real' what is far-fetched sci-fi in reality.
As such, discussions like this are both healthy and necessary in my humble opinion.

I also think the stance of 'everything is public' does not cover the vast difference between the 'public' we know from RL and the possibilities in SL. While a RL company could in theory run a spy satellite network to track the movement of everyone in the 'public' space and offer detailed logs of places and activities for sale, nobody has to worry about that in 'RL' public space. Because it is simply not technically feasible or economically viable. And if evolving technology should make this scenario more realistic, you would soon see legislation suggested to control and regulate it. Much like what is happening with RFID technology now.

LL has, as I see it, already built some notions of privacy into SL. For example, there is no API or user interface, where a random person can find your current location. Only friends whom you specifically allow (default is to not allow), can see where you are when you are online - and only by bringing up the friends window when they themselves are online. I am tempted to conclude that LL has intended your location in-game to be a private matter, with the obvious exception of other people in the same location.
However, nothing currently prevents a company from launching a bot-net for the purpose of logging all public movement with the intent to sell this data, providing a service which goes far beyond what previously only my friends could do with my explicit consent. In effect, breaching privacy that even LL intended us all to have in my opinion.

I can accept that not every rule of RL applies to SL, since I am inherently anonymous in a way I can never be in RL, but I still think that some of the possibilities opened by unrestricted botting go beyond what LL intended, and beyond what we can reasonably expect - even in a 'public' and anonymous context.

1) Bots aren't required for this. Someone could more easily deploy script-net of scanners (much like the land-scanners of time gone by) that swept their areas and reported to some external data collection/processing site.

2) LL limits the number of alt accounts someone can register. Sure a bot-net could be done with entirely anon accounts, but that's thousands of email addresses to set up. I wouldn't put it past some determined someone to do it... but eww.

3) In RL... you can't rent a car, fly on a plane, take a cruise... or (often) even gas up your car without it becoming part of your credit report at the very least, which far more than legitimate government agencies have access to. It's not just space-cams looking down on us tracking our movement.

Not anymore http://secondlife.com/knowledgebase/article.php?id=308

Probably much easier from a records/accounting standpoint. Too much to keep track of.

And of course helps the bot owners .. so its a win win

i guess.

Excellent points, Yumie. The possibilities being opened up go beyond not only what people and LL foresaw or intended, but also beyond what is good for SL or its Residents or LL, and into what can be manifestly bad for them. The fact that the technology means something obviously odious CAN be done does not make it acceptable if something odious IS done.

So privacy in SL has at least two dimensions that are important to people in SL - and by extension, to LL. One is having the option to be let alone - by chance intruders, griefers, ex boy friends, spammers, whatever. The other is having the option to not be spied upon, in whole or in part. I think both are important. I'm beginning to think being let alone is the more ubiquitous concern - but not being spied upon will prove the more important concern.

I stand corrected, thanks! =)

If it makes you feel better, think of it this way.. if a bot-agency of some sort gets out of line, this would make it easier for LL to ban all their alts at one time.

Im pretty sure what will happen is the number of bots will grow exponentially.

At some point the sheer numbers of bots will require some sort of regulation, or they will be a detriment to the Second Lives of the real residents, not just those of us "obsessed" with our privacy.

At which point many people will say,

"Hmm why didnt Linden Labs see this coming?"

All the more reason to remove the concept of 'traffic' now to remove one of the easy reasons for why people might want to run bots.

I strongly doubt bots will ever out-number humans in secondlife.

I *DO* expect, at some point, that there will be an increase in service bots or vendor bots. Clothing merchants could have a bot that would demonstrate clothing and attachments using the customer's exact avatar shape, for example, without the need to give away 'demo' copies of product.

That, frankly, would be kind of cool.

Looks like there should be a whole separate thread on bots in general. This one is about privacy in SL in general.

The camp that says "there is no privacy in SL and never will be and God wills it that way so bend over while we insert our proctoscopes" has been abundantly heard from. The camp that says "leave me alone until I invite you in, moron" not as much. But it is becoming clear, I think, that privacy is NEEDED. Not only by individual residents, but by SL itself, and by LL.

Aside from the sex angle. If you are having a serious conversation with someone in SL, do you really want some random jerk walking through, or some spybot watching you (or listening - who said all spybots will obey the TOS)? If you are having a business meeting, is that what you want? Especially if it is your competitor's spybot? If you are a woman with a stalker to deal with, do you really want him knowing where he can find your av on SL 24/7/52?

The fact that such things can be done leads to the next question, IMO: How to stop them?

Oh... I think most will agree that LL has QUITE ENOUGH PRIVACY already.

Try finding them if you think otherwise.

Use a private channel?

And as I have already pointed out, with the large radius that normal chat works over, if you're in a fairly built-up area, neighbours can hear you through their walls anyway.

Using an IM window is no more hassle than a chat window.

fwiw-

The speach radius extends approximately 20m from the center of the avatar.
(The typing sound can be heard further than text will be seen.)

They dont have to be to become a difficult to manage problem.

If there were 500 searchbots instead of one - they are an insurmountable problem using the "just ban it" solution.

It there were 20 , youd have a hard time knowing about them all.

Agreed, cHex, that would take care of audio. In fact, people can, if they want, do that now by adopting TeamSpeak or Ventrilo, both of which allow password-protected private audio channels. I would not be surprised if businesses in general don't all eventually adopt some solution such as this in SL - not even LL could listen in!

And, as Zephyrin points out, IM is available in-world to protect typed conversation -- an important example of LL being aware that privacy is important.

That leaves visual or physical (in an SL sense) intrusion or spying. It appears to me the biggest single privacy problem is unrestricted camera viewing, especially when combined with the little trick of clicking on a remotely viewed sittable object to enter any private space (until actively banned, of course). Anybody have any thoughts on dealing with that?