Open letter to Linden Lab: Enforcing policies?

[EliseAnne85]

22 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Which is what makes this interesting:

1 hour ago, Tommy Linden said:

As we previously mentioned, all of the information that is currently being displayed on a third party website, is all accessible via lsl script call, and is considered to be public information. I understand there are some of you that don't agree with that decision, but at this time that information is considered public.

I am confused also.  SMH   It says it is accessible via lsl script call but where does it say someone has a right to publish our information on a third party website?  Where in the TOS, do I have that right, to publish it?    

I am especially looking through LL's privacy policy right now.  And, just the privacy policy is confusing, not to mention, rather long.   It includes wording such as "our data" but doesn't really explain what it means by our data.   

https://www.lindenlab.com/privacy#section-8

[Arielle Popstar]

1 minute ago, Love Zhaoying said:

So, gardening is a legitimate use for Bots!

Don't forget to stay on the focus of the topic.

 

Quote

 

1.6. You agree to respect the Intellectual Property Rights of other users, Linden Lab, and third parties.

You agree that you will not copy, transfer, or distribute outside of Second Life any Content that contains any Linden Content, in whole or in part or in modified or unmodified form, except as allowed by the Snapshot and Machinima Policy, or that infringes or violates any Intellectual Property Rights of Linden Lab, other Content Providers, or any third parties.

 

I don't get how the BBot site isn't in direct contravention of this section of the ToS. Further why would LL allow linking the Profile from outside of LL itself?

 

[CaithLynnSayes]

Just now, EliseAnne85 said:

where does it say someone has a right to publish our information on a third party website?

Nowhere, because LL's ToS doesn't apply to a third party website....

 

[Coffee Pancake]

1 minute ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Further why would LL allow linking the Profile from outside of LL itself?

I really don't understand why LL are letting the cat out the bag. When it comes to data as a commodity, it's not names and emails and personally identifiable stuff that makes it valuable, that all gets stripped by brokers and replaced with an ID anyway.

It's literally everything else .. which is exactly what just walked out the door.

That site is gold mine to anyone interested in or invested in the metaverse space. The secret sauce of why SL survives and why all other fail.

We wont sell you data! .. but we will let anyone systematically scrape it for free.

[Coffee Pancake]

1 minute ago, CaithLynnSayes said:

Nowhere, because LL's ToS doesn't apply to a third party website....

So why do they bother setting rules for taking pictures in SL

[Sparkle Bunny]

9 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

where does it say someone has a right to publish our information on a third party website?  Where in the TOS, do I have that right, to publish it?   

here it is:

Quote

Any information, content or communications, including personal information, you provide when you use any of these features will be available to the recipients (dependent on the nature of the tool) and may be publicly posted and otherwise disclosed without limitation as to its use by us or by a third party.  

That's from the Privacy Policy, and does seem in direct contradiction to the Intellectual Property clause in the ToS. I've granted LL permission to reproduce the text and images from my profile because profiles would be unusable without that; but I don't recall surrendering my copyright in the text and images to allow them to be republished anywhere without restriction.

Edited January 24, 2023 by Sparkle Bunny
added info

[CaithLynnSayes]

Just now, Coffee Pancake said:

So why do they bother setting rules for taking pictures in SL

Are you yanking my chain now? You of all people here should know how the internet works, come on now  

Also, i didn't know they did that. That's hilarious.

[Rowan Amore]

Information You Provide when Using our Services. Please note that our Services may offer chat functions (either one-to-one or within a limited group) or other forms of communication services (such as real time voice communication either one-to-one or within a limited group), forums, community environments (including multiplayer gameplay) or other tools that are either restricted to other account holders or Services users or that do not have a restricted audience and can be accessible by anyone. Any information, content or communications, including personal information, you provide when you use any of these features will be available to the recipients (dependent on the nature of the tool) and may be publicly posted and otherwise disclosed without limitation as to its use by us or by a third party.  

While we endeavour at all times to protect the privacy of our users and to ensure no harm is caused through our Services, given the nature of the tools, we have no obligation to keep private any information you made available to other users or the public using these functions. To request removal of your personal information that you have posted via such a tool, please see the “Your Controls, Rights and Choices” section below.

[TimKoul]

6 minutes ago, Sparkle Bunny said:

here it is:

That's from the Privacy Policy, and does seem in direct contradiction to the Intellectual Property clause in the ToS. I've granted LL permission to reproduce the text and images from my profile because profiles would be unusable without that; but I don't recall surrendering my copyright in the text and images to allow them to be republished anywhere without restriction.

So who are the "recipients"? Bots? Anyone with lsl knowledge?

[Silent Mistwalker]

3 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Information You Provide when Using our Services. Please note that our Services may offer chat functions (either one-to-one or within a limited group) or other forms of communication services (such as real time voice communication either one-to-one or within a limited group), forums, community environments (including multiplayer gameplay) or other tools that are either restricted to other account holders or Services users or that do not have a restricted audience and can be accessible by anyone. Any information, content or communications, including personal information, you provide when you use any of these features will be available to the recipients (dependent on the nature of the tool) and may be publicly posted and otherwise disclosed without limitation as to its use by us or by a third party.  

While we endeavour at all times to protect the privacy of our users and to ensure no harm is caused through our Services, given the nature of the tools, we have no obligation to keep private any information you made available to other users or the public using these functions. To request removal of your personal information that you have posted via such a tool, please see the “Your Controls, Rights and Choices” section below.

Without that "clause" in bold, we would not have had inworld vendors. Or any inworld transactions.

[Sparkle Bunny]

The recipients are other logged-in users who can view your profile. That includes bots.

[Arielle Popstar]

11 minutes ago, Sparkle Bunny said:

here it is:

That's from the Privacy Policy, and does seem in direct contradiction to the Intellectual Property clause in the ToS. I've granted LL permission to reproduce the text and images from my profile because profiles would be unusable without that; but I don't recall surrendering my copyright in the text and images to allow them to be republished anywhere without restriction.

Which then begs the question of whether it would be worthwhile to start hitting that site with dmca and copyright violation notices.

https://www.findlaw.com/smallbusiness/business-operations/is-it-ok-to-copy-material-from-a-website.html

[Coffee Pancake]

Just now, Arielle Popstar said:

Which then begs the question of whether it would be worthwhile to start hitting that site with dmca and copyright violation notices.

https://www.findlaw.com/smallbusiness/business-operations/is-it-ok-to-copy-material-from-a-website.html

Yes. If you take a picture, put it in your profile, and then its on their site .. you can do that (the same applies to written text too, but images are easier)

The problem is the images are hot linked to LL's CDN, so they probably cant take your image down without manually adding a database entry for each and every UUID's they can't show, which would be a pain in th... wait ignore me, gung ho!

[Rowan Amore]

Back on topic...Some.policies do.seem to take presidency over others.  The gatcha policy, the skilled gaming policy, the a.g.e.play policy.  All.policies with real world consequences.  Bots and alt accounts have no laws in RL against them so seem to fall to the wayside.  Fine.  Takes people to enforce them.  I get it.  What needs to be done is a complete overhaul of existing policies.  Toss out those that they plan to ignore and stop confusing people.

[Innula Zenovka]

6 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Which then begs the question of whether it would be worthwhile to start hitting that site with dmca and copyright violation notices.

https://www.findlaw.com/smallbusiness/business-operations/is-it-ok-to-copy-material-from-a-website.html

There's only one way to find out  

https://www.dmca.com/FAQ/What-is-a-DMCA-Takedown

I agree with Coffee -- if you've created the image, then you own the copyright.   You've agreed to allow LL to show it on their profile pages, but that doesn't mean anyone else is allowed to hotlink to it.    Go ahead and file a request and see what happens  -- if they can't help for some reason, you've not lost anything other than the few minutes it takes you to fill out the online form.

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

1 hour ago, Sparkle Bunny said:

Given that you have to register to join SL in order to execute the scripts, that's a peculiar definition of public.. Meanwhile, you should probably delete https://my.secondlife.com/settings/privacy. It's misleading to suggest that people can control who their data is shared with when that is actually not the case.

Or they could revisit that and adjust it as needed.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

44 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

This takes us right back to RedZone. At the time the TOS was changed to reflect that, at its most basic, exporting info from within SL to an external site was not a legitimate use of a bot. In essence, RedZone was a bot. I think that wording has been changed since then and is no longer as clear cut as it once was.

Well, the RedZone analogy is an interesting one.

It would be wrong to use it in an alarmist way: RedZone was outright evil. It preyed on people's fear and paranoia, and then became essentially a protection racket, whereby only those who paid for the product were protected from it.

I have seen nothing to suggest that these bots are being used for anything remotely analogous to that.

What's more, although this is more a technicality, RedZone used scripted objects and HUDs, rather than bots. And it collected information if you came to it: it didn't scour the grid scooping it up.

But . . . there's one important similarity between the two: both involve the collection of "publicly available information" in-world (which is to say, only "public" within the platform), and applied it to an off-platform database where it could be searched, manipulated, and so forth, without the restrictions of the LL ToS or LSL to constrain them.

LL did, finally, deal with RedZone, despite their guidelines about having no responsibility for information on 3rd party sites.

But they did so by removing the in-world objects and HUDs that were the mechanisms by which RedZone worked. The web site which we dare not name has only a few, very minor in-world applications (a Rez Day board? Anything else?)

So, the only way LL can effectively deal with that is by cutting off the information collection at the source. Which is to say . . . the bots.

[Theresa Tennyson]

44 minutes ago, Sparkle Bunny said:

All those people have now had their privacy compromised, because the walled garden they thought they were interacting within doesn't have functioning walls.

It never did. If the information in your profile that you've allowed anyone in Second Life to see could somehow endanger you, there was nothing stopping Sammy the Cat from your local businessman's protection society from creating a free account linked to a burner E-mail address and accessing the information that way.

[EliseAnne85]

26 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Information You Provide when Using our Services. Please note that our Services may offer chat functions (either one-to-one or within a limited group) or other forms of communication services (such as real time voice communication either one-to-one or within a limited group), forums, community environments (including multiplayer gameplay) or other tools that are either restricted to other account holders or Services users or that do not have a restricted audience and can be accessible by anyone. Any information, content or communications, including personal information, you provide when you use any of these features will be available to the recipients (dependent on the nature of the tool) and may be publicly posted and otherwise disclosed without limitation as to its use by us or by a third party.  

While we endeavour at all times to protect the privacy of our users and to ensure no harm is caused through our Services, given the nature of the tools, we have no obligation to keep private any information you made available to other users or the public using these functions. To request removal of your personal information that you have posted via such a tool, please see the “Your Controls, Rights and Choices” section below.

That seems to be about "chat" and what one might say, such as..."I launder money through SL".  IOW, what I'm asking is the above and the privacy policy about bad guy stuff...money launderers or other illegal activity or does it include all our data.  For any illegal activity within SL, we all know that is NOT private.  

Anyways, that Privacy Policy is very long.  But, I was wondering if it involves our real life info more than anything (especially when it needs to be given to law enforcement) or if it includes all our data.  

[Innula Zenovka]

56 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

In essence, RedZone was a bot.

How do you make that out?   RedZone depended on landowners (not bots) rezzing something on their land that scanned for new arrivals and rezzed something that grabbed their IP address using a well-known exploit involving parcel media and then posted them to an external database.   This database then tried to match the IP addresses thus collected and posted details of which avatars shared the same IP address, on the assumption they must belong to the same person, on a website for subscribers. 

Bots, in the sense of scripted agents, weren't involved in any way.   

[Rowan Amore]

4 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

That seems to be about "chat" and what one might say, such as..."I launder money through SL".  IOW, what I'm asking is the above and the privacy policy about bad guy stuff...money launderers or other illegal activity or does it include all our data.  For any illegal activity within SL, we all know that is NOT private.  

Anyways, that Privacy Policy is very long.  But, I was wondering if it involves our real life info more than anything (especially when it needs to be given to law enforcement) or if it includes all our data.  

But it goes on to say in that same paragraph...

or other tools that are either restricted to other account holders or Services users or that do not have a restricted audience and can be accessible by anyone.

Anyone who is an account holder can access your profile within SL.  That it's post elsewhere is beyond LL's control.  

[EliseAnne85]

1 minute ago, Rowan Amore said:

But it goes on to say in that same paragraph...

or other tools that are either restricted to other account holders or Services users or that do not have a restricted audience and can be accessible by anyone.

Anyone who is an account holder can access your profile within SL.  That it's post elsewhere is beyond LL's control.  

Why someone would do that with a profile is silly.  I could make up a fake profile in Photoshop.  It's a way to get people to click on links though.  Person A contacts person B whom they made a fake profile of, and text a message "want to see where I published your profile?" and the person starts clicking.  That's something along the line of how my ex husband was hacked.  

[Coffee Pancake]

26 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

It never did. If the information in your profile that you've allowed anyone in Second Life to see could somehow endanger you, there was nothing stopping Sammy the Cat from your local businessman's protection society from creating a free account linked to a burner E-mail address and accessing the information that way.

Local chat is as public as profiles.

But I'm tempting a ban hammer if I relay that out of SL without the consent of all parties.

[Rowan Amore]

1 minute ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Local chat is as public as profiles.

But I'm tempting a ban hammer if I relay that out of SL without the consent of all parties.

Since when?  LL has absolutely no say over what is posted off of their services.  They never have.AFAIK.  

All Second Life Community Standards apply to all areas of Second Life, the Second Life Forums, and the Second Life Website.  Says nothing about off site.

[Sparkle Bunny]

6 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

But I'm tempting a ban hammer if I relay that out of SL without the consent of all parties.

Apparently not anymore! That privacy policy makes any form of inworld communication fair game for third parties to do whatever they like with. People have been posting chat logs on gossip sites for years, and there's never any comeback.