Automated Burglary

Rights prevent you from being controlled.

Thats kind of the point.

They are about freedom - not constraining it. The only freedom my rights would limit is the freedom of someone else to take advantage of me.

In my imaginitive world I would have freedom from umpteen bots gathering data they really dont need on me.

I do not think limiting or even prohibiting spybots is going to stifle creativity in second life.

You have your vision of what SL should be, so do I, as does every resident, no problem there. Your vision may not agree with mine. That's perfectly acceptable as well. What is disturbing, is in this case and in general is a feeling that one's prticular way is the only right way, anyone who sees differently is stupid, or nor worthy of being heard, or their concdrn is not of import to me, therfore it is trivial. Again I don't direct these generalities at you specifically, but as an overall trend exhibited by some.

Hmmmm, looks like this discussion has degraded into namecalling, ideological clashes, parsing of words, etc. Mind if I give you a real-world example of how the ESC bot is wrong in my mind and a violation of people's feeling of "security" (such as it is) within SL?

When this thread first got started I popped my name and my mate's name into the ESC search engine. Lo and behold, there was our whole bedroom set (some items she bought, some I did, but from the same furniture store). All the items showed as for sale and included prices and a TP link that went straight to our bedroom. After seeing this I immediately went in world and inspected each item and sure enough they were marked as for sale. Luckily they were for sale at the original prices, so I guess the bargain hunters were deterred...

My point here is that without my knowing and through no fault of mine my property (purchased from a well-established SL merchant of high quality goods) was mis-marked for sale, those items indexed by the ESC bot, identified as for sale, and put on a website with a direct TP to my land. Had the merchant really screwed up and set the sale price to $0 I doubt my stuff would have lasted long enough for me to have corrected the oversight.

In all the high-minded discussion going on here I ask you how you'd have felt had you lost your posessions in this manner?

Please save the "you have no privacy" arguments. That's not my point here. Like Sun Microsystems founder Scott McNealy said years ago, "You have no privacy on the Internet. Get over it." I accept that, especially as it relates to SL. What I do mind is that through no wrongdoing on my part I could have lost property that I paid real money for. It was pure caprice that I happened to catch the OP's comments, that my stuff wasn't set to sale for $0, and that no one had stumbled on it yet.

Ok, I've had my say, flame away...

Maybe its time we got some privacy on the internet too. Imagine for a moment Fast forwarding 50 years down the path where the individual is marginalized in an information based society.

Back to your post though -

Obviously the problems with this searchbot are amplified when items rez with for sales permissions and the owner doesnt realize it.

The owner is not at fault for these little glitches that could cost them Money. They might be "responsible" in that they should double check their items - but they are not at fault.

Until this stuff stops happening, people will have to be very careful with their items. Would be nice if we at least let people know.

Are you a Google stckholder, by any chance? You seem to keep bringing them into the conversation.

I disagree with your real world example -
The solution to these concerns wouldnt be to tear up the Bill of Rights.

Personally, I'd have felt stupid for not checking to make sure the items were set properly once I put them out (yes, I actually do check). It wouldn't be the first time I made a stupid mistake, and it surely wouldn't be the last, but I can't lay blame on anyone else but myself (unless they magically turned themselves "for sale" due to database corruption of some kind, but that's a different kettle of fish). I might try to ask for the items back, but failing that, I'd go buy another set of items and make a better effort to be sure they weren't set for sale when I put them out again. Once bitten, twice shy.

Nope. Just a common user of their service, which I appreciate its existence very much.

No, but neither is the solution to place unrealistic "rights" which stifle others' right to use the service, which was the point of the example.

Very interesting. I just did my daily sheepbot check, to see if my items had been updated lately. My store info was about a week stale as of yesterday, so clearly there were not daily updates going on in my home sim.

Now all of my items have been removed from the database, except for the freebie box I have at the Stillman Bazaar. I didn't opt out of the program, and Grid Shepherd is not banned from my store parcel, though it is banned from a private parcel I have in a different sim.

So I'm still having a hard time grasping how people's items that they don't mean to have up for sale are getting immediately listed and swooped, when my store sale items only got updated one time the entire time this thread has been running, and now they're completely gone.

What gives? Is the answer somewhere in the previous 10 pages of posts I haven't finished yet?

Lets assume I had the right to privacy

My objects could not be scanned automatically and listed on a thrid party website without my consnet.

My whereabouts couldnt be automatically-tracked and listed on a 3rd party website without my consent.

Other residents were told what Trespasing is sometime when they were new.

Where does this infringe on others rights in Secondlife?

It infringes on their rights to read a list of my objects and my whereabouts?

OK, let's assume you had the "right" to privacy.

Your objects that you rezzed in public places (like our sandbox) could not be scanned to see who they belonged to or why they were left there, without your consent. Are you going to give consent manually to every potentially interested party every time you rez a prim somewhere?

Your location couldn't be tracked in our sim, so we couldn't track you down if someone reported you needing help, or griefing other people.

It's never as cut-and-dry as these little forum debates make it seem, is it?

I don't think anyone's items were ever immediately listed and "swooped". I think the OP's situation occurred over the course of a significantly longer period of time, like a day or so. Of course, it might have been pretty quick, too, but I think that would have been coincidental.

Also, the indexer service is probably suspended whilst they effect some changes in its operation, given all the feedback they have gotten over it.

Cute.

No one would have privacy in places listed as public. You also wouldnt have privacy from a land owner on others peoples land (but they would have privacy on their land)

You would have privacy on your parcel. You would have privacy on other parcels who chose to extend that courtesy to you.

Which you can set to note a home or retail location if necessary. I can set the entire home to not for sale with one click, as opposed to setting each indivdual item in it.

Stop it - Common sense scares people.

Great, so we can have more broken enforcement code which causes things like people getting thrown off their vehicles and losing them, and more lag from all the byzantine series of checks "if land is private, but if not the owner, but if owner extends privacy, but, but, but....".

No, thanks.

Oh, wait, we can just make it only in the CS, and complicate that document beyond belief to the point where enforcement will be more of a farce than it already is.

No, thanks.

The cost of the kind of privacy you are wanting is far more than the expense I would be willing to pay for you to feel secure. I certainly don't want any part of it.

I maintain if you want that level of privacy or security, *you* pay for it, or find it somewhere else.

Allow me to clarify why I'm insisting on ACTIONS instead of discrimination.

Open source clients start off mixing bots with humans. Then things get blurry. Cyborgs, viewers with some bot aspects but controlled directly/interactively by humans. Advanced viewer clients with tools that can do bot-like things but without any bot aspect to them.

You have to break it down to the ACTION level for rules to be binding.

As to "cultural relativism". A sufficient percentage of the population do not believe in absolute wrong and absolute right. This is why we MUST have rules and laws.

Even poor-ish residents can rent land in private sims. If privacy is so important you have to be willing to earn it, either by paying for it or sacrificing freedoms. There's plenty of privacy offline for those unwilling to compromise or pay.

Deej-

Content should have "for sale" sticker pulled off it upon purchase.
There was a bug which apparently was failing to do this for a while.
Which is more of a reason to be angry with the lindens than with esc.

I wouldn't doubt that a lot of lost/destroyed content claims may have
ended up with someone picking up items they saw weren't locked down.

Talarus - Its obvious youve already made up your mind.

I can paint similair pictures about bots gone wild that you wont feel is fair to your side of the argument.

Your not going to convince me that Privacy, Respect for others, and common courtesy are bad ideas.

Your not going to convince me only the rich deserve these things. As Brenda was saying - "If they have no Bread, Let them eat Cake!" - is not a productive attitude.

Expanding on the entire 5 sentences of the section of the Community standards is hardly "Complicating it beyond beleif"

Its interesting how unregulated botting is "manageable" and a few changes about Privacy are not.

Ive made my mind up also - the more protests I see the more obvious that the Status Quo side is even more unreasonable than the Run Electric Sheep Bot out of business side.

It would be easy enough to write up a definition if thats how Linden Labs chose to proceed.

A bot is not a resident.
A resident using a souped of veiwer could be.

Someone that hopefully was reasonably unbiased would draw a line.



Again confusing laws with right and wrong -

The was a law which allowed the internment of Japanese Americans during World War 2, the country ("American Culture" was at war with Japan and thus afraid of them- so it was Culturally acceptable to do with the majority.

It was big time wrong though.

History is full of examples - 100's , 1000's

Some things are of course relativist - other things are simply wrong no matter what the culture or the laws say.

Im sure someone who was to sacrificed to the gods by the Aztecs was comforted by the fact that it was both legal and cuturally right that they should die.

Not a good time for Virgins, definitely.

Great. I like the whole mentality of blaming the unwitting.

Had I known that every time I made a purchase (as I do now--it seems the entire SL world is now a risky place where we must be ever vigilant of others' screw-ups and defend ourselves accordingly) I'd need to check permissions and the items' for sale status, I'd have certainly done so.

It appears that SL is becoming much less an entertaining pastime and more like the RL every day, but without any real regulation, protections, etc. So each one of us should become tech experts and learn all about the ins and outs of this platform so as to not get screwed by the next techno-terror that comes along?

No thanks. I do that everyday in RL. I work in IT for a living. This is supposed to be fun...increasingly it's just not worth the bother.

Now you can't even buy a freaking pair of shoes and not have to worry about some bot finding them, listing them on a website and someone coming onto your land and snatching them, but it's my fault for not knowing better. Brilliant.

Maybe they can improve the bot so you can just send the items directly to your designated object swooper - thus saving you having to make room in terms of prims when you get home.

I really think the LEAST Linden Labs could do is issue a warning to people on the login screen.