New Abuse Report Handling - abuse report privacy?

Private estate owners will soon have the option of receiving and handling abuse reports instead of abuse reports going to the Linden abuse staff.

See blog http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/04/20/introducing-estate-level-governance

Will estate owners and managers be able to publish or otherwise disclose the content of abuse reports?

if you ar the owner of the lands friend then you lose the friend wins


lol


aweseom system

As I understood it, they can share the AR's with their managers or anyone they want to.

coco

I think I get the practical effect of this system.

Dont bother AR'ing anyone.

And cross your fingers and toes someone doesnt AR you to An Estate Manager who doesnt like you.

How is this different from today?

Folks have been clamoring for a more transparent abuse report procedure. I suppose there can be one now. Estate owners can post all the abuse reports they get to a website, if they wish.

I'm usually someone rather paranoid and watchful about 'rights' and so forth; I think everyone knows I'm not keen on large scale, trans-grid banning systems or "rating" systems.

That said... and while this is a bit preliminary, I haven't seen the system... I can't quite yet see how this scenario is any *worse* than what we have now.

I get notecards all the time about this issue or that in my sims... I don't pass them around, but certainly, any notecard or IM text could just as easily be shared.



For me, there are only two sticklish things so far.

One, that it rather puts a sim owner in an apparent authority position.

I can see an argument for that I guess, but in my sims I'm the 'land guy' not 'daddy'. Nobody signed up for me to be King Solomon, nor did I want to offer said services.

I hear there is an 'opt out' such that one can continue to use the standard Company abuse reporting procedures - this might be ideal.


Second issue, is that I am thinking that perhaps by virtue of sim ownership some may somehow find themselves in a position 'above the service terms'... this seems "unright" ... perhaps not 100% wrong but turning a completely blind eye would be irresponsible, I think.

On the other hand, I can't vouch for how blind the eye is yet; the system is not in place.

* * * * *

I think one of the great values of the grid is that by many measures, we are all equals no matter what. Perhaps such halcyon days are coming to an end?

Not sure we can blame an abuse reporting mechanism for that; I honestly don't have any better ideas in a world growing so large, so fast.

I dont know what a good system is either, I do know is this:

Id rather no one ever was banned from the grid for bad behavior than to allow Residents to influence other's perceived guilt in the eyes of the Lindens.

Mmmm... fully agree with that.

I'm not terribly versed in this new system; I wasn't one of the beta testers. What do you see that I'm missing?

Do estate "AR's" and their resolution somehow feed into an official database somewhere? I'm not clear at all how the system works.

Throw in a chained ban system ala Banlink and this is scary.

As long as the Region owners are very responsible than the system works.

Once some people start acting .. shall we say .. human .. than it fails.

Right now I could be banned from 100 regions and the Lindens wouldnt do anything about that.

From what Chadwick's saying they will be as part of this new partnership style system.


Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Who is going to make sure that the "Region Police" are responsible?

Who watches the Watchmen?

far as I can see - no one will be.

Thing is when its Lindens who decide on bannings - the Lindens are responsible by the nature that they are banning customers.

Therefore understandably reluctant.

However, if they start basing their decisions based on Resident Recomendations (how many of their deputized residents ban them from their sim), the whole process changes.

Someone's access to the grid should not be based on whether they are banned from multiple Private Islands. It should be based on Specific, Verifible breaches of the TOS/CS, determined to be Account ban-worthy by Linden Labs.

It seems to me that what Chadrick is saying is not that if someone is banned from X regions, they will be banned from SL. I see him saying that if someone is banned from a number of regions, then that will raise a red flag in the DB. Once that is done, LL will look into it more to see if there is a real problem with someone that need LL intervention. I would assume that abuse reports will still goto LL, but they just don't act on them if the estate owner is this new system. That is just how I read it, take it for what you will.

I read it the same way.

However you can go from be banned from 0 regions to being banned from 100, for 1 offense against a landowner.

And if this raises a red flag and causes LL to look into it and they don't see a clear ToS violation, they should not take further action.

So you are concerned that they will just gloss over what actually happened and say "Oh yeah, this guy is banned from 100 sims, let's get rid of this character", or something like that?


.

Right now Grid access is based on investigated Incidents.

Investigating you based on Reputation - which is what this ammounts to - is not the same thing.

The fact that its a Reputation that is in the hands of these Estate Governors who are not truly accountable - is adding insult to injury.

Given past history, I expect LL to pay as much attention to "Avatar X has N bans" as they did to say... policing the event calendar.

They aren't delegating authority, they are abrogating it.

I also really don't like this idea.

First of all, the argument that it's ok for an Estate owner to break the TOS on their own Estate is very dangerous. That means someone could put up a PG private island and fill it with porn. Or that they could shoot people in ways that cause permanent damage on their Estate... as far as I'm aware, owning land has never made you invulnerable to the TOS before (eg, if you want to shoot someone on your own house, you technically need to go to About Land and turn off the Safe flag first)

Secondly, the business of escalating to a ban from SL. Here the problem is that someone can go along and completely wreck, attack, and mess up a private island, and the most the owner of the estate can do is to ban them from that estate, not from SL. On the blog, it was mentioned that "if someone is banned from too many regions they'll be investigated for banning from SL", but this seems really problematic - namely that a) griefers can destroy one island per alt "for free", and b) a group of people who all own regions could all ban someone in an attempt to get them banned from the entire world.

Given the alternatives .. for them to say they will watch it and then just ignore it - Is probably the best outcome.

How long are the records that would need to be examined, such as the names, positions of objects, chat history, etc. maintained?

Why do i read here only about the "poor" banned person? In the first place i think when everybody behaves with common sence it not needed to make a AR or ban.

I'm a sim owner, and after a week time i met a few people who just think it's fun to misbehave. My region is PG and had partly a religous signature. When people come to my island behaving as in a sexclu (happens at least 3 or 4 times a day) i want to be able to ask them to leave, but when just asking them to put some clothes on, you don't want to know what they are saying.... and indeed... i ban them.

The tools are ment for mis-usage, and think some people live for that!

You Misunderstand-

I have no problems with a land owner banning people from their sim, or block of sims.

I have a problem with bannings leading to a LL investigation of an account holder.

In my veiw, Investigations should be based only on direct accusation of breeches of the TOS/CS.

Exactly. Assume, for example, you end up banned on enough Gorean Estates to raise a red flag at LL. Your offense? You're gay. Perfectly acceptable under this new system. In such cases, LL should only look for offenses that are a violation of the TOS--and being gay is NOT a TOS violation, nor of the CS. What bothers me here is that now Estate Owners will be able to adopt their own CS, and brace yourselves, kiddies, because you are going to see ejections for being gay, black, Jewish, male, female, furry, scaley, Christian, Muslim and whatever else someone takes it into their head to hate that day.

It's been said that SL is based on the book Snow Crash. Anyone who thinks that the book presents anything but a nightmare vision of a lawless future where anything goes really needs to read the book again.

Harlan Ellison once said:



And it looks like that is where SL is headed too. Good thing? Bad thing? Probably a little of both. But the interim is going to be difficult and nasty, I suspect.

Kam

It seems that we are on a headlong collision course with Reality.

Clearly, a small Company isn't going to be able to dispense justice to us for long, with the way the grid is growing.

And Justice, as a product, goes bad easily. Metaverse / game companies are famous for poor decisions implemented with the blunt end of a hammer, particularly when large groups doing undesirable behaviour X or Y are involved.

So what will eventually curb the civil rights injustices?

United States law, I think.

Not because anyone wants that, or because the servers are located there, or any of that. But the Company is located there, and as such is a corporate citizen of the United States... and that's where the real teeth are.

A Federal judge demanding digital content being removed - porn, hate speech, gambling mechanisms, whatever. Leverage over their corporate citizen, no matter what the location of the customer.

That's the consequential core, and there's the painful truth.

Scalable or not, there's no real way for the Company to get out of the babysitting business if complaints begin to be filed via the courts.

* * * * *

And yes, it would be scary if BanLink + Estate Justice = Scarlet Letter.

But I don't think anyone at the Company is SO far removed from the grid sociopolitically to not realise what is going on.

And if I'm wrong, paradoxially perhaps I'd imagine the Goreans have more to worry about than anyone else.