Privacy & Reporting - 2 standards?

Hello!

Firstly, this post is about privacy and reporting; not about anonymity. While there is certainly a relationship between the two, this post focuses on privacy and reporting. Please feel free to weigh in on anonymity in the recent and active anonymity thread - link below thanks!

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I am curious to hear people's opinions on privacy and reporting in SL. In my own experience, there seems to be a sense that tracking of avatar-specific traffic and public chat is not to be reported and is violation of privacy however, and I could very well be wrong, both of these activities seem permitted in the LL TOS. My question, then, is that how are the general current standards of tracking on the web (excluding deliberately malicious tracking of course) different in principle from Second Life?

For example, one can use google analytics to track a significant amount of detail about visitors to one's website, certainly far more reporting than available in Second Life generally (aside from SL companies producing detailed reporting products). What are the reasons, short of a lack of SL features, one can track this depth of detail on the web but should not in Second Life?

With regards to public chat, anyone can read comments on the web however one turns to email or PMs for private web messaging and IMs for private SL messaging. The difference between the 2 modes is very clear. The LL Community Standards stipulate that public chat is not to be recorded but one can see public chat cut&pasted into many prominent SL blogs for example, including public chat logs of people who did give consent for such. Is this a violation of the TOS? It seems not as these bloggers' avatar accounts are still active. What are the reasons one can record public comments on the web but not in Second Life?

Lastly, a little more specifically and perhaps more of a feature request, why aren't IP addresses of avatar visitors available to land owners? And IP banning? This seems like it would be pretty standard (although of course there are many things that should be standard in SL and are not ).

Thanks for any considered and thoughtful responses!

making ip`s public is opening the door for directed ddos attacks against specific people, adding an ip ban for alts trough LL would be better

Thank you for your response and good point.

How is this different than the rest of the internet today? For example, as a website operator, one can record IP traffic and then I suppose they could chose to attack other people - i.e. google is providing information that can be used maliciously. On the web, the surfer is responsible for their own travels and visit websites at their own risk; what are the reasons that this would be different in SL?

Good question. My initial thoughts would be because SL is an interactive and social network, which is quite different than the web. The web is primarily viewing static pages produced by someone. SL is individuals and groups interacting in realtime. If you had to constantly worry if anyone was grabbing your IP address for the purpose of an attack, i think it would put a huge damper on the social aspects. But really it just comes down to the fact that it's the 'Will of the Lindens' that things should be as they are.

cause tbh, the grid is full of retartds that would take the oppertunity to cripple avi *** ***** as they know their ip

trough the web they won`t be able to find avi`s **** ***** ip unless they follow a link given ingame trough llLoadURL so they can log the avi name and the matching ip

people who have a SL web based service might or might not log this info tho, i know i don`t as the more you store, the higher the chance is it will backfire, specially in a place like SL, annonimity is partially lifted as they can attack you at your RL home with ddos or even do an ip trace and lookup of where you actually are

Agreed Darien - the real time nature of SL versus the less interactive nature of the web means the IP may still be active which is less likely on the web (unless the user is running a router which is always on but there is no way to know this from the receiving end). However, how is this different than IRC, which is real time and offers moderators IP addresses and IP blocking? The same situation you describe exists here.

So using that analogy as it relates to SL, who would be the moderator? If every person who owned land had access to the IP of every person who ever stepped onto their parcel, wouldn't that be like giving every member of an IRC channel moderator powers? Imagine how that would turn out.

Agreed Alicia and I have ran into many of these folks myself! However, it is safe to say that the entire internet is full of these people as well. How is this managed in IRC? This is the best example I can think of in terms of relating to SL's real time nature.

BTW, in addition to llLoadURL which requires the user to confirm, it is possible to get people's IP of address today without them knowing if their media player is enabled using a combination of LSL and the web (i.e. the LSL parcel media commands linked to tracking of the delivered content object from the server, which doesn't necessarily need to return any media to SL).

It seems to me that the general sense in SL is that the visitor has more weight/rights than the host/land owner, which is contrary to rest of the internet.

Thanks for your responses!

In general, I think everyone has a right not to risk persecution by some random whacko they didn't know was a whacko on first encounter. If that means privacy, especially IP privacy, so be it.

true, but for as far as i`ve heard/know, this will only get your ip, as if you were loading a webpage and can`t be tied to your avi

using llLoadURL, you can link an avi to an ip and if that ip is static, your screwed if it falls into the wrong hands untill the isp takes action

No, though I perhaps I don't understand. I am talking about the land owner having access to this data and so I am not sure how then everyone else would also has access to this. To take the analogy a little further, perhaps estate managers also have access to IPs as moderators do on IRC. What are the reasons that this method in IRC should not also be so in SL?

However, if they have come and gone, as you note, then the IPs are no longer fresh and guaranteed active, which was our real time concern earlier. This then becomes the equivalent of standard web reporting, which returns us to the original question: what are the reasons that this would different than web reporting?

I agree with that assessment. LL has always put the rights of the avatar first, many times to the detriment of the medium. I've been in SL for over a year and active in the forums here since day one. And in that time i've seen countless calls for features which would violate this 'Avatar First' mentality which LL has, many which are without a doubt beneficial to all residents of the grid. Exactly 0 of those have ever gained even the slightest amount of interest from the Lindens, and I don't see that trend changing very soon.

It's against the CS to record chat *without the speaker's knowledge*...such as with a spy device...and to use it for some prohibited purpose.

But simply recording public chat is NOT illegal. Your viewer even allows you to record chat and IM logs, and you are encouraged to use those logs for certain purposes...to provide evidence in submitting an AR, for example.

Agreed, however this is not about avatar-to-avatar first encounters but about visitors, who could very well be one these random whackos, to your land.

Maya Realities is an SL reporting tool that reports the IPs of visitors to your land and does so using a similar method.

Thank you for your response - yes, very true indeed.

Does that mean one could record public chat with a bot - which are allowed by LL on the grid - but not LSL? Technically this would still be spy device as you note but difficult to stop/prove.

Thank you for that information. I checked out the tools on their website and my question is how are they able to gather information that sim owners are not and SHOULD be able to view? Why should a sim owner who pays $295/month to LL per sim have to pay a 3rd party $60/month for something that is obviously attainable?

Are they using bots or something like that? Forgive my lateness, but this is a new one for me.

~Maddy

It will be interesting to see if this mentality changes when/if the SL is opened up to 3rd party sim hosting, which is on the LL plan. I suspect that many of the 3rd party sim hosters will offer such reporting & other value-adds and are likely not share the same avatar-first philosophy as their first priorities will be land owners who pay the bills. Certainly SL avatars may not choose to leave the confines of the SL grid but if the 3rd party sims offer better reliability, performance and pricing, it will only be a matter of time before people go to 3rd party sims that they know and trust - just like the web sites today.

Hi Maddy - I have recently completed an LSL project where different people can watch different media streams on the same object and am very familiar with the LSL parcel commands. My LSL media player plays media automatically and the user never has to start the media player manually, all they need is to have their streaming media enabled.

Streaming media is only passed through SL via QuickTime. So, by extension, if on your parcel of land you have an LSL script to trigger the parcel media commands and are playing media (even a 'blank' media file that doesn't produce any image or sound) from your own server, you can therefore capture the IP for reporting from your own server (typically already part of your server admin tools) - and the avatar will never know.

Variations include linking this reporting to the avatar key itself but this, of course, would require some cross-platform development. However what I described is pretty straightforward to do. If you get really fancy, you can have a tiny parcel of land set up for this, use LSL sensors thoughout your sim and use llRegionSay to communicate with the media object on the tiny parcel to catch all IP traffic on your sim.

btw, I am not doing this. Yet

Ah ok, that makes more sense. I wonder is the Maya Service doing the same thing or something else? If it's the same thing it seems like it wwould be quite unreliable if half the visitors did not have their media enabled.

Thanks for the info though, much appreciated!

glad i have all streams disabled then

You are a smart avatar!

now if i was just as smart as some others here, scripting would go along much faster...

IRC mostly deals with the reverse DNS names rather than the actual IP, which makes it much easier for an op to ban a specific ISP, a specific town/state/country for a specific ISP depending, etc. Most modern IRC networks will also mangle the first part of the addie and provide consistency for IP addies that won't resolve for a name (with reverse DNS you ban left to right, with IP addies you ban right to left) so that an op still has all the benefits of mask banning (or regular people for muting) but noone's actual IP is publically availale.

If IPs were ever exposed on SL though, you can count on the fact that within two weeks someone will be providing or selling a list of alts. It also makes RL location in terms of country and possibly city public information.

Many web chat and bulletin board packages have an option to display a poster's IP as part of the post header. This could be very useful in assisting users to detect manipulative/abusive people posting under different names. Most admins that I know disable IP display for a very good reason.

It's a *given* that easily-available script-kiddie stuff would be used to probe/attack others via a publicly-displayed IP.
Owning land in SL is far closer to being an end-user of an online forum than to being the admin of a website.

If LL were to enable IP banning by landowners in SL it should only be done as an option on the parcel Ban list, with only LL having knowledge of the last known IP used by particular avatars.

Current: Ban the avatars on this list
Future option: Ban any avatars sharing the last known (by LL) IP of the banned avatars.
a) Full IP or b) Masked (leading digits)IP.

IP banning can be a very blunt instrument, with unintended collateral damage, but it's better than nothing.