OMG youve got to see this!!!!

Nimue, I am with you 100%.


Okay, Diva, back to the privacy issue: in SL browser, search on ?Pisa

On the first page, you get her two houses in Anacortes Harbour. I guess that's okay, even though all these adjoining sims are strictly residential and there is no commercial activity whatsoever allowed.

But on page 2, look at the other Anacortes Harbour listings for her. You see a sampling of the things in her living room.

This woman is going to go nuclear when she realizes that something has been going through her stuff.

I don't think you're going to get away with telling people they can opt out, and how to do it (which won't work for renters, anyway.) I'm less paranoid than most, and I'm thrilled your trying to make a decent search engine cause the one in SL is an embarrassment, but man, oh man, re this privacy stuff, I wouldn't want to be in your shoes when Pisa types her name in... grin.

I think your assumption here is quite wrong. What does that flag say? It says that the owner wants to be searched and wants random visitors. It's a very good indication whether or not items should be included.

I really hope that you find some way to list Buy Original items. I have a gift box version of my EZ Animator that must be set to Buy Original. Also, the rest of my vendors are all scripted and use the "Pay" function instead of "Buy". So almost nothing of mine is showing up

I just did a search on several medical conditions, including AIDS, HIV, etc, and found people who had material on these and other conditions in their homes, which might be some indication of their medical status in RL.

I was also able to ascertain an avatar's likely sexual orientation or activities by looking at the material that come up in their homes.

I was also able to gauge an avatar's likely affluence by seeing the prices of some of the things in their homes.

Thanks for doing this research.
With these kinds of searches, what you're finding out is that lots of sellers continue to flag their products "For sale" even after they are sold to somebody, which is a bit strange. But given that the situation seems to be so pervasive, we definitely need to revise our assumption of what "For sale" means, and be a lot stricter. It will be fixed -- probably not today but next week for sure.

What I would really like to stress is that SLBrowser is not a product; it's a technology that is about 3 months old. There won't be a product here until all these privacy issues have been settled, and if they can't be settled, there will never be a product, because people won't use it, and advertisers will not be interested -- as simple as that! So you have nothing to worry about.

Thanks for pointing this out too. This has been fixed. If you search now, you won't see those objects.

Hi, I am Diva's partner in creating SLBrowser.

Some friendly users of our system recently pointed out, and gave us reproducable cases, of objects that our robot identifies as being "For Sale" when in fact they cannot be purchased. This has to do with some strange settings in SL, where product marked "For Sale" still has the "For Sale" flag checked after it has been purchased. In this case the object isn't really for sale.

We currently list such objects, but this is a bug in our system. It probably accounts for a large number of objects in people's living rooms being incorrectly listed in our system. I'm very sorry about that, but happy that it has been reported so that I can fix it.

We don't want to include personal items in our search, and I am confident that I'll be able to improve the code in our robot to include only objects that are legitimately for sale. I'm working on it now. In other words, please don't assume that because our system currently behaves in a certain way that we want it to behave that way. There are bugs and things that need to be fixed, and incorrectly identifying for sale objects is a big one! We didn't find out about it until a user let us know. We enjoy working out issues without growing user community.

I hope everyone will realize that there is no documentation on this stuff, and we are experimenting. At this point all of SL is an ongoing experiment. You may not agree that such experiments are worthwhile. However, we believe that they are, and we have many users who believe this too, so we will continue. We appreciate constructive feedback and have already demonstrated that we respond to it. But telling us to "stop everything" is not feedback that we will act on.

I am also working on a solution for vendors. I'm experimenting with a few options, but the most likely scenerio will require adding a script to the vendor (or the vendor server) to connect it to our search. But you will only have to do that once, and the search will take care of itself as you update your vendors.

As for ads, we are not going to charge people for basic listings, just as Google does not charge either content publishers are users for basic search. In Google the ads are a secondary stream of information that allows advertisers to communicate to users based on what searches they are performing. The ads are clearly separated from the search results.

Vendors solution sounds hot. Make sure pls it works with JEVN -- and if you connect it with the server, make sure location of server itself doesn't come up in search, grin...

Ads sound hot. If you are able to get the privacy issues ironed out so that I don't get associated with controversy, I'd certainly be interested in taking some out.

I would want a lot of information about how that worked before I put it inside my vendor. I think I might balk at any script that wasn't open.

One preference would be some sort of one time use script. Let it drop into the vendor, communicate the necessary data and then I can remove it. A script sitting there either shouting out to potential bots or listening for their call could be a source of lag.

Yes, a one-time script is a variation that we have experimented with. Its hard to make this be an open model, however.

We favor openness. This would work better as a script that listens on a special channel. I'm happy to propose a simple standard and provide a reference implementation as a script. This would introduce a slight bit of lag, but i'm not sure it would be very significant.

We will explore both options. The only hard part is dealing with all the different kinds of vendor configuration. Networked vendors may also give problems in locating the actual vendor objects. These issues are the same for either way of commnicating to the server.

Places should probably only include properties that have the search places listing tagged. A quick search on 'skybeam' listed many properties belonging to my residents, again raising the potential of landing on someone's private land. Then I searched for one residential lot that had only the general name tab filled in, no description, not listed for show in search places and not checked for publish listing on the web. Bingo, two entries came up... my resident's and one other private residence on the mainland.

OOOOPS!

I find this is something to both be worked around and with. The whole bot/spider thing can't be prevented, so one has to figure out how to make them both the least intrusive to privacy and the most useful to business.

As everyone else has stated, the data is very dated. My sandbox is listed as having a one hour auto return and that might have been true the first week it was live but hasn't been for months.

If this is going to be a truly useful tool for anyone and worth any sort of future advertising revenues, you might want to up the number of bots running because right now its so out of date as to make me not even bother using it much less supporting it.

<scurries off to write an informational notecard for her residential tenants to suggest they change their property names & descriptions to blank to protect their privacy from this until its noted that its fixed...>

Char

Charlene and I had a good chat and she suggested an interesting potential solution. The problem is that the "Show in Search > Places" checkbox costs 30L a week. That means its not a free description of whether you want to be listed. But we are investigating wether the drop-down to the right of the checkbox can be set/read even if the checkbox is off. The proposal is to not list items set ot "Resitential" with search checkbox off. Diva and I will investigate.

We also discussed the data and discovered Charlene had a parcel with old information that she hadn't noticed. We just released a snapshot of the data that was created in the last few days, so all the data is relatively fresh.

Here I thought this topic was going to be about food

People complained were pretty upset that they would have items sold and bought that weren't intended to be bought for just anyone when the sheepbot thing happen.
People complain about ban lines yet this maybe only defense for some who don't want some bot or somebody snooping through there I can't turn off the buy option panties because its no mod that I have heard inflicts some peoples objects turning then accidentally into buy. I haven't experienced this yet but maybe I just can't see my no mod objects with buy out there either..
Though the good thing at least is Felix seems concerned about the privacy factor which is good thing.
Any search that put ups things people hadn't intended to sell and then is sold or people are wondering around their homes might upset lot of residents.
I understand being curious and creative, exploring since I am bit of mad scientist myself but not at same level.
There been few items I made that other people saw and told l me it was strange, no one would buy it but that wasn't the point of making the item.

The problem is that drop down is only used when someone first clicks the check box. It determines which area you want to be searched in. If you don't click the check box, you wouldn't bother changing that drop down.

This is an assumption, I admit, but of the parcels that are not listed in Search, only a very small minority of them are shops which would want to be searched. For every shop area that you are including, there are maybe 25, 50 or 100 or more that do not want to be searched.

First and foremost, the search checkbox must NOT be checked *and* the drop down changed to Residential in order for the bot to exclude them; the assumption being that if it is checked, folks probably want to be found.

I understand that most people are not going to know to change that drop down, but it was the best available option that's simple to do for a residential owner to set that the bot could read and say 'oh! I need to leave this one alone!'. Its a start on the road to protecting the privacy of the residents who want to be excluded from this browser without having to go find an opt out kiosk or website link or whatever.

The creator of SL Browser, Mr. Wakmann, was concerned that he wanted his system based on being free to the business owners, meaning that he didn't want his bots searching only lots with a flag that costs $L30 a week to be checked.

My overriding concern is how to protect the privacy, however scarce that commodity is in SL, of my residents from being one click away on some HUD by everyone who happens to procure and use one.

I don't know how to get the information to every residential only parcel/owner/renter/etc in SL, I certainly would if I could, but I did have to make certain that my residents can be easily excluded if they choose to do so, and by extension everyone else who gets the word.

Char

*locks*