The bot war is over and the bot farmers have won :-(

[steeljane42]

26 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

As @Innula Zenovkamentioned, there are other ways besides bots to gather this information.   

I, as a simple avatar can harvest the exact same data.on hundreds of people a day if I stood at Exhale or another busy place.  

It's the scale and the level of automation that matters, though. Like bots in MMORPGs. You can farm gold yourself just fine, it's meant to be acquired by normal people and put into the game's economy. But when it's done by hundreds or thousands of script controlled accounts that are on 24/7/365 it becomes a problem, crashes the markets and causes inflation (yes, in games too).

Same with the data. You may waste your time and collect enough of data on a few places you might be interested in. Maybe for a few days, maybe for a few weeks, depending how curious you are and/or how much free time you have on your hands. But it's the drop in the ocean compared to what a few dozens of bots can do in the same time frame.

Buying a little parcel in hundreds of regions is also not a viable alternative. It costs money, and not like all regions have them for sale to begin with, nor do they offer random people to rent some ad boards. But most of them are still open to just about anyone, so bots will do it all, much faster and for free.

P. S.

I don't really care about bots myself, except in my own region which is access list only since the day I've got it, and not because of the bots. I just don't need random people there.

Edited March 26, 2023 by steeljane42

[Alazarin Mondrian]

9 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:

I just set my access to anyone, payment info on file and allow unrestricted access to anyone in my group.  Have yet to have a bot on my parcel or even near it when I've been at home.

That might work for some people but our land is also a venue and I want our venue to be n00b friendly which means keeping the doors open for NPOIF avatars. The downside is that it's also an open door for bots 😕

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

That doesn't mean it's still not be collecting

It also doesn't mean it's not still being collected!  But if they are collecting bees, I hope they are at least wearing appropriate protective gear. Those bee stings can hurt. 

[Ceka Cianci]

2 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

We're getting into dangerous territory here, as we know how LL and the mods feel about discussions specific to one particular group of bots.

I'll just say that developments over the past few weeks have meant in effect that the amount of really invasive information available off-grid has been greatly reduced. That doesn't mean it's still not be collecting -- and we don't know why, or what plans there are to deploy it in some new form -- but the situation has, at least in terms of publicly viewable information on the web, much improved.

Ya, that's why I'm keeping names out as much as possible.. I did mention something on my first post on page one about one of the sites.. But that was just showing where someone could find those things to do what they wanted with the information.. hehehe

I forget the name of that one already.. It'll come to me  later I'm sure..

 

 

 

[Rowan Amore]

7 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

protect the individuals that use SL.

Protect you from what?  YOU are safe.  Your avatar (which technically is the property of LL) is what the information is about.

I DO agree.that parcel.owners or renters should be able to ban bots.  The problem, as already mentioned, is that people simply won't register them as bots.  Unless we're also given an ability to DETECT which avatars are bots, the issue will.persist.  That registered bot can still land on that parcel next to you that allows.them and collect your avatars info.

LL can't do anything about the false information published weekly on Virtual Secrets.  I'm sure in the scope of things, it's done more harm to more people than data on some obscure website that few people even knew about until it became a topic ON THE FORUMS.

[Prokofy Neva]

7 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

On Mainland, though, there's not much to be done about bots gathering whatever information they want, unless the whole region were to disallow access by scripted agents. Parcel-scope access can't prevent those agents landing elsewhere on the region and gathering everything they could if they were on the forbidden parcel.

But there's still a valid reason for Mainlanders to want bots off their parcel: they can be quite pesky, without the bot-runner having any ill intent at all. This would encourage them (the law-biding, well-intentioned among them) to find other parcels to use instead, maybe spreading landing points around the region a bit.

A Mainland-owner who owns the entire region might prevent a registered bot from landing anywhere on the region, and thereby reduce the data collected on that region by properly registered bots—as well as Estates could, anyway, although that data privacy motive seems futile to me, even on Estates, because the bad actors aren't going to self-designate their bots as scripted agents unless the Lab has enforcement tools beyond my expectations.

But to be clear, all this Mainland / parcel-scope / region-scope talk is hypothetical, and would depend on the Lab implementing something like the jira I submitted a few days ago. I mentioned it in at least one other thread already so I don't want to belabor the point here.

Yes, but that's why I'm suggesting that they only be able to land on Linden land, as the first step, and then eventually if the Lindens love them so much, they can carve out 16m on every sim for them. 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

11 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

It also doesn't mean it's not still being collected!

No, you're quite right. It doesn't.

Which is why transparency is so very important. And right now, this is all pretty opaque, still.

[Sid Nagy]

25 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Protect you from what?  YOU are safe.  Your avatar (which technically is the property of LL) is what the information is about.

I DO agree.that parcel.owners or renters should be able to ban bots.  The problem, as already mentioned, is that people simply won't register them as bots.  Unless we're also given an ability to DETECT which avatars are bots, the issue will.persist.  That registered bot can still land on that parcel next to you that allows.them and collect your avatars info.

LL can't do anything about the false information published weekly on Virtual Secrets.  I'm sure in the scope of things, it's done more harm to more people than data on some obscure website that few people even knew about until it became a topic ON THE FORUMS.

Avatars can be linked to individuals, if that individual ever made a mistake with protecting their links to a certain avatar ever. Internet never forgets. And that is what can make it possibly very troublesome for some.

Not everybody lives the same lifestyle inside SL as outside of SL.

So if someone out there could figure out who is the puppeteer from Sid Nagy knows really nothing about my SL. But when a bot service provides that information on a website or as a data package, then professional data harvesters like Google are more than willing to add 1+1 together.

And I'm almost 100% certain Google already knows who we are in SL. Most of us ain't computer savvy enough to protect ourselves constantly against the cookies, trackers and who knows what the Googles of this world use on related and unrelated websites.

To give you an idea: secondlife.com alone has 32!!!! cookies running on my machine at the moment. Almost certain a few of them are connected, related with or even provided by Google as well.
That are more cookies than I have in my cookie jar at the moment at home.
No need that bots feed the cookie monsters of the Internet even more.

Edited March 26, 2023 by Sid Nagy

[Ceka Cianci]

10 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

No, you're quite right. It doesn't.

Which is why transparency is so very important. And right now, this is all pretty opaque, still.

That kind of puts things between a rock and a hard place..

To be transparent we would have to see what they are doing, but to see what they are doing we would be exposed..

And if they have to do it then so do all the others doing it too.. If we have to see what all the other are doing and everyone else seeing it too..

It's like  black and white cat and mouse game fighting over a red herring on a slippery slope..  Wake up boys, we're in a helluva spot!

hehehehe

Edited March 26, 2023 by Ceka Cianci

[Scylla Rhiadra]

1 hour ago, Innula Zenovka said:

Scylla, I think we started to explore this in one of the other threads just before it got locked, so let's see if we have more luck here.

What "data scraping" or "data harvesting" do you say a scripted agent in SL is capable of?   Outside SL, depending on the privacy settings you've chosen in your web browser, people can use both cookies and the data your web browser sends them to track your searches, where you arrive on a page from, which links you click, and so on, but that's not possible in SL.

All a bot can do in SL is grab some basic data about your avatar if it happens to visit a region at the same time you're there.   And if you consider the number of regions in SL, combined with the fact agents (scripted or otherwise) are limited to (I think) 6 teleports in a minute, the odds are pretty good that most of us are going to encounter them only very rarely.

If I wanted to gather data on avatars I'd not waste my time having an army of bots flit around the grid hoping to find people.   I'd rent small parcels on regions with high-traffic locations and drop scripts in objects on my parcels, or drop them in my vendors or ad boards at the locations themselves.

Well, we do actually have some insights into what can be collected through both things that were published on the web, and APIs that provided even more granular information. Personal info collected includes (and I'm talking now about more than one data scraping project):

• Where particular avatars where at given times
• As a corollary of the above, who else was in the same region with them
• What attachments they were wearing
• All of the information in their profile, including info not readily visible (specifically account type) without the use of scripts
• Whether someone was online or not (this, however, was probably not from bots)
• When their last log-in was (again, not from bots)

There may well be additional information, but that is what we can say with certainty was being collected. The lack of transparency associated with some of these bot projects means that there is no way to be sure what else has been harvested and saved.

Not all of this, as I've noted above, comes from bots. And the marketplace info does not (although attachments data does). And, on an individual basis, not much of this is new or worrisome (although some of this does evade privacy controls LL itself has set up), although providing online status and last log-in is potentially worrisome. (And yes, there are in-world HUDs that do this now, and can show log-in patterns, but that's equally suspect, and also just available in-world.)

The real danger, of course, is from aggregating this data. Not merely where you were and wearing what, when, but who you were with, what they were wearing, what the theme of the region is, how often you are online with people you've been captured with, etc. I don't, I'm sure, need to explain what one can do with a really large database.

I want to underline that there is zero evidence that any of the data being collected by anyone right now is being used for particularly nefarious purposes. I find a lot of it invasive, but in general, the projects I currently know about are relatively benign (if maybe somewhat clueless). But this should all be a bit of a wake-up call.

As for the efficiency of bots? Well, sure, they must be a pain. But that is going to be determined by the kind of information you want to collect.

[Innula Zenovka]

26 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

Sure you can, but with a bot you can do that data gathering on thousands of individuals within a jiffy and that is the big difference.  They can gather all about us available in a relatively short time that is totally impossible without bots.
And they get all the info automated on their PC's and draw conclusions on individuals that would be impossible to do in that scale without the use of bots.
So allowed bot use should in my opinion be very strictly formulated in ToS to protect the individuals that use SL.
Again, that would not stop them 100%, but it would weaken their position and it would give LL tools to act against excessive use of bots IMHO. 
 

Sid, I'm sorry, but you're mistaken. A bot can't collect any data in SL that you or I can't collect because, like us, they can use only the very limited  data collection tools available with LSL -- basically, grab the uuids of all the avatars on the region using llGetAgentList and then use those to collect what they can using llGetObjectDetails and llRequestAgentData and a few other functions..  It's really not much.

A bot is simply a regular SL avatar whose actions in SL (teleporting,  responding to IMs, etc) are controlled by code running on the owher's PC rather than by the owner directly.   They can't do anything we can't, and there's no way they can gather data on thousands of individuals in a jiffy, as you put it. because they need to be on the same region as the individual about whom they're gathering data.

[EliseAnne85]

33 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:

That kind of puts things between a rock and a hard place..

To be transparent we would have to see what they are doing, but to see what they are doing we would be exposed..

And if they have to do it then so do all the others doing it too.. If we have to see what all the other are doing and everyone else seeing it too..

It's like  black and white cat and mouse game fighting over a red herring on a slippery slope..  Wake up boys, we're in a helluva spot!

hehehehe

Unless, we, as real life people, urge our governments to make it a law that all bots must be registered and fully identify with their registration number or else will face penalties.  Or....? (something like that).  

With Apple's strict policies about adult content (SL shouldn't have to deal with all residents information harvested and put on the web by another party); and now Utah, the first state to limit a minors time per day on social media among other things (I think for Utah now it might have to be 18 only - I'm not quite sure), and the AI age fully upon us, perhaps we need some real life regulations. 

Some bots are good and helpful, of course.  It's the bad actor bots who are the bad actors.  The people of SL objecting are not the bad actors and it was not paranoia that caused the objections.  Again, SL is an adult MMO and some content should only be accessible by logging in.  

This is another part of the problem I wanted to address.  This is Adult media content site and needs to stay that way.

Edited March 26, 2023 by EliseAnne85

[Quistess Alpha]

14 minutes ago, Innula Zenovka said:

[Bots] can use only the very limited  data collection tools available with LSL

Bots have access to viewer functionality. LSL can't read your profile*, but a bot can.

14 minutes ago, Innula Zenovka said:

They can't do anything we can't, and there's no way they can gather data on thousands of individuals in a jiffy, as you put it.

Bots are faster at 'reading' than people are. the time it takes me to pop into a busy sim with say, 30 avatars and read all their profiles is maybe 5 minutes if I'm just copy-pasting to a document. a bot could do that in a couple of seconds, and can find new regions with lots of people in them faster than a person doing it manually.

Anything a bot can do, it can do faster than you.

*Actually LSL could look up your web profile with a HTTP request, but that's not the point.

Edited March 26, 2023 by Quistess Alpha

[Ceka Cianci]

20 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

Unless, we, as real life people, urge our governments to make it a law that all bots must be registered and fully identify with their registration number or else will face penalties.  Or....? (something like that).  

With Apple's strict policies about adult content (SL shouldn't have to deal with all residents information harvested and put on the web by another party); and now Utah, the first state to limit a minors time per day on social media among other things (I think for Utah now it might have to be 18 only - I'm not quite sure), and the AI age fully upon us, perhaps we need some real life regulations. 

Some bots are good and helpful, of course.  It's the bad actor bots who are the bad actors.  The people of SL objecting are not the bad actors and it was not paranoia that caused the objections.  Again, SL is an adult MMO and some content should only be accessible by logging in.  

This is another part of the problem I wanted to address.  This is Adult media content site and needs to stay that way.

Sorry, that wasn't really meant as a very serious post.. I do that sometimes with people that know I get a little silly at times even in serious topics.. hehehe

It's kind of my version of someone on SNL trying to make one of the others break on stage.. hehehe

sometimes it works ,sometimes it doesn't

[Prokofy Neva]

1 hour ago, Sid Nagy said:

Avatars can be linked to individuals, if that individual ever made a mistake with protecting their links to a certain avatar ever. Internet never forgets. And that is what can make it possibly very troublesome for some.

Not everybody lives the same lifestyle inside SL as outside of SL.

So if someone out there could figure out who is the puppeteer from Sid Nagy knows really nothing about my SL. But when a bot service provides that information on a website or as a data package, then professional data harvesters like Google are more than willing to add 1+1 together.

And I'm almost 100% certain Google already knows who we are in SL. Most of us ain't computer savvy enough to protect ourselves constantly against the cookies, trackers and who knows what the Googles of this world use on related and unrelated websites.

To give you an idea: secondlife.com alone has 32!!!! cookies running on my machine at the moment. Almost certain a few of them are connected, related with or even provided by Google as well.
That are more cookies than I have in my cookie jar at the moment at home.
No need that bots feed the cookie monsters of the Internet even more.

I read somewhere that years ago, when Google first got started, Brin said that they started getting all this dialogue and data from online games, and it overwhelmed them. So they set their system not to collect from games as it's a lot of repetitive dialogue and not worth it, plus they can't scrape the data effectively from anonymous avatars, I might add. But he did mention that. So I don't think they in fact scrape from online worlds. Of course it's another matter if they find connections online outside the game.

[Innula Zenovka]

47 minutes ago, Quistess Alpha said:

Bots have access to viewer functionality. LSL can't read your profile*, but a bot can.

Bots are faster at 'reading' than people are. the time it takes me to pop into a busy sim with say, 30 avatars and read all their profiles is maybe 5 minutes if I'm just copy-pasting to a document. a bot could do that in a couple of seconds, and can find new regions with lots of people in them faster than a person doing it manually.

Anything a bot can do, it can do faster than you.

*Actually LSL could look up your web profile with a HTTP request, but that's not the point.

That's what I meant, though -- if I wanted to collect data on people I'd do it by script, of course, but I wouldn't bother with a bot.  I'd either do what a bot does, and wear an attachment that did it for me, or put out objects on regions that contain a venue that gets a lot of traffic.    Bots do their data collection using LSL scripts in prims, but you don't need the bot to do that.   

 

[PheebyKatz]

54 minutes ago, Innula Zenovka said:

That's what I meant, though -- if I wanted to collect data on people I'd do it by script, of course, but I wouldn't bother with a bot.  I'd either do what a bot does, and wear an attachment that did it for me, or put out objects on regions that contain a venue that gets a lot of traffic.    Bots do their data collection using LSL scripts in prims, but you don't need the bot to do that.   

 

This. This is why I can't be arsed to freak out over bots anymore. I can do a better job than them, just by wandering around. The stuff I saw them displaying on the bot data site wasn't even close to the kind of intel you can gather on everyone in any region you visit, and a load of that can be done with a single function.

Realizing this, I couldn't care less about bunnybots or any other lower life form on the grid anymore. If they wanna show people our sim traffic, so be it, that's just free advertising. It's not like they're telling people who's wearing what, just that a lot of people wear it.

"Most popular attachments" didn't leave me feeling violated at all. I scrolled every page to see if anything I made is on the list of the 10,000 most popular items, lol.

Edited March 26, 2023 by PheebyKatz

[Sid Nagy]

11 hours ago, Innula Zenovka said:

That's what I meant, though -- if I wanted to collect data on people I'd do it by script, of course, but I wouldn't bother with a bot.  I'd either do what a bot does, and wear an attachment that did it for me, or put out objects on regions that contain a venue that gets a lot of traffic.    Bots do their data collection using LSL scripts in prims, but you don't need the bot to do that.   

 

Yes, data can be gathered not only with bots, data mining will always be a problem. But it is no reason to defeat and let everything happen. A company, every company, should at least make a serious effort to protect the individual data that can be gathered. I doubt if LL is doing this so far. And I would like them to change that.

The bots don't gather info on a few people like inquiring minds indeed could do manually.
The bots grab everything they can lay their hands on from everyone inworld they stumble over when they patrol all regions on a regular (daily) basis. And than the gathered information (that everybody only theoretically can gather manually from everybody) is analyzed, conclusions are drawn and than published on the Internet, who knows even monetized in some ways.

Nothing to worry about,  if big Internet data harvesters can find out by comparing and combining al the snippets of data they can gather,  that RL male A is an avatar that plays a woman in SL or RL female B is an avatar inword that always plays a man in RL, that RL male C plays a female fox in SL or that RL female Fox D plays a male lion in SL and so on?

Automated data gathering can be used for the best like anonymized statistics but also for the worst like data linked to individuals and then published on the Internet. And it is the latter that I'm concerned about.

And the fact that LL places over 30 cookies through their website on our machines, only shows to me, that they themselves gather more information about us than is strictly needed to run the website.
So I don't expect much too happen. Only attempts to extinguish the small fires here on the forums by making a serious discussion about it as hard as possible and saying two lines in the Lab Gab miming their chocolate sides about this matter that in reality doesn't exists that much.
For the rest they will try to wait for the storm to pass IMHO.

 

Edited March 26, 2023 by Sid Nagy

[Sid Nagy]

.

Where is my coffee?

Edited March 26, 2023 by Sid Nagy
I quoted myself instead of editing my post.

[Love Zhaoying]

  I think that we are lucky fortunate that Bots do not in general appear to be collecting information on "Where avatar XXXX was seen".  So, they are not posting on Victual Sucrets how many times we frequent seedy venues (i.e. as Popeye mutters in pre-Hays Code cartoons, "Houses of ill repuke").

Edited March 26, 2023 by Love Zhaoying
Not so lucky

[Arielle Popstar]

13 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

  I think that we are lucky fortunate that Bots do not in general appear to be collecting information on "Where avatar XXXX was seen".  So, they are not posting on Victual Sucrets how many times we frequent seedy venues (i.e. as Popeye mutters in pre-Hays Code cartoons, "Houses of ill repuke").

They do or at least were collecting our pics which often include the type of places you call seedy. So whether or not they actually see us there, they are still collecting the information about those places that we think are worth advertising in our picks. As a reader of profiles, since this has all started I have seen a significant drop of people advertising their favorite places as well as a lot of other details about who they are and what they are into like lifestyles etc.

[Love Zhaoying]

Scraping your "picks" (you wrote "pics", which usually means "pictures"..) is completely different than recording and reporting your actual in-world location when a Bot "detects" you there.

[EliseAnne85]

12 hours ago, Innula Zenovka said:

That's what I meant, though -- if I wanted to collect data on people I'd do it by script, of course, but I wouldn't bother with a bot.  I'd either do what a bot does, and wear an attachment that did it for me, or put out objects on regions that contain a venue that gets a lot of traffic.    Bots do their data collection using LSL scripts in prims, but you don't need the bot to do that.   

 

The thing is why would you do that and what would you get out of it?  

I am just curious what someone would hope to accomplish by doing the above?  

And, would whatever you are going to do with the information be for you, be for SL inworld only, or be for the main web (blog/website)?

Edited March 26, 2023 by EliseAnne85

[Arielle Popstar]

To get a pic of the Pick does not one need to be there? I suppose one could create it manually but regardless, it must mean it is important enough that one deems it worthy to advertise in the Pick section and the Avatar has likely been there. Highly likely in fact that they have been multiple times. So how is it completely different?                                                         

[Qie Niangao]

Because I spend almost all my time on Mainland regions that have Linden protected land, I assume any bots that want to can get my information as often as they want. I couldn't care less about that, but I do wonder if they really need to go to all the trouble of running bots to collect what they're actually trying to find out.

Ages ago, one thing about individual avatars the Lab wouldn't provide was a library function mapping from Name to Key for arbitrary agents not present in the region. Every scripter eventually needed that information to perform what everyone agrees are useful functions. A third party created a database that could be queried to fill that need, by collecting data from all around the grid. They didn't really need bots to do it* because they offered the collection scripts for anybody to put in any of their prims. A lot of us did just that because it was information everybody needed, and every scripter eventually used. (Much later, 2018 IIRC, llRequestUserKey() finally provided what was needed all along.)

Point is, if the bot runners are collecting genuinely useful data, the kind we'd volunteer to collect for them, they wouldn't need to use bots to do it. 

___________________
*I'm not 100% sure they didn't use bots, although as I recall this Name2Key database was around before libopenmetaverse, so if they did use bots they must have been very primitive. And anyway, they couldn't have needed those bots if they used all the data we fed them.