New Feature: Scripted Agent Estate Access Discussion

[Arielle Popstar]

7 hours ago, Phil Deakins said:

I'm quite amazed at how much discussion there is about privacy in this thread. If I put something into the public domain, it's public, not private. My profile is public, and available to anyone in the world. If I state things about me in my profile, I have no expectation of it being private, or kept within SL, or anything like that. I have made it public information. If I display my own artwork or poetry that I write in my profile, as someone mentioned, I put it into the public domain. It's my own doing. Nobody else has any responsibility to prevent the wider world from seeing it.

Define "public" in the context of a virtual world. It can easily be understood to mean the public as it exists within SL while at the same realizing that because it is a free to join world, the public beyond could have access if they register an account. And isn't that the way it is from the Lab itself? I tried googling for the profiles of some inworld personalities but could not access any profiles without being logged in, so the idea that the Lab means the "public" local to SL itself is not a stretch. The discussion has been about the wider public exposure of Profiles by a third party who obviously thought the world at large would benefit from having a collected, searchable database of Profiles at its fingertips. That it is now closed to those Profiles suggests that SL didn't really mean "public" in the sense you are suggesting should be acceptable and allowable by the ToS.

 

5 hours ago, Caeruleiae said:

This thread-like much of the internet-has only proven that people fail to read tos and other such things more often than they actually succeed.  I already knew that of course-I see it constantly and have to deal with people who either didn't read or didn't fully understand something. It probably shouldn't surprise me-but yet it still does all the time. My personal experience is that it's always been a generational thing. It's rarely ever people around my own age that have trouble reading through or understanding the tos and such. But that's just anecdotal-possibly directed related to my job and interactions with people where IT is concerned-and not necessarily evident of a more widespread issue outside of that. People-in general-probably more often than not don't fully read through things regardless of age. 

I think it probably goes beyond just having to read the ToS as a few have pointed out already, to get a proper idea of the full extent of how LL looks at Profile privacy and even with that, the fact that they at times use discretionary powers to allow or disallow aspects of what can be put out in public, points out that even with what is written, it is not set in stone. As an example I would bet that even though the information contained within a profile is supposedly "public" I'd give you odds that if I were to post a screenshot of some interesting inworld Profile, my post would get deleted quite quickly as a result. It's public but not within the Forum and therefore by precedent, not really "public". That its allowance is contained within the ToS itself is probably no more then the Lab covering it's butt in case it does.

I also would doubt it is a generational thing as I have seen young and old posters alike post TL;DR comments to posts which were more then 3 paragraphs long. How much more so a 3 page contract filled with semi legalese language being read by potential residents for whom English is a second language.

Strikes me that the majority of the ones arguing against any restrictions of bots and/or limitations of the scripting that allows the scraping, are IT people who are mostly scripters and coders themselves. Almost like they put function over privacy. I sense it is that more at play here rather than whether the ToS has been read sufficiently or not.

[Arielle Popstar]

4 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:

I'm sure that's probably the case since FB has had their own privacy issues.  I know on Flickr, you can set your own preferences so you can not be tagged in someone else's photo.  I no longer have a FB account so I can't check to see if tagging in photos or not is an option.

Isn't it likely then that it is a requirement by some jurisdictions?

[Caeruleiae]

15 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

As an example I would bet that even though the information contained within a profile is supposedly "public" I'd give you odds that if I were to post a screenshot of some interesting inworld Profile, my post would get deleted quite quickly as a result.

I have no doubt that you're correct-it would definitely get deleted. But if you took that same screenshot and put it somewhere else on the internet-even though ll has stated they don't want people doing that-it would remain right where it is in most cases. Even if the person who belonged to that profile made a big thing about it-odds are better that you wouldn't actually have to take it down-and we know that ll can't make you. Ll's own terms say they can't make you. Do it anonymously and there is absolutely no recourse the person who it belongs to or ll has.

That's the point some of my posts made-what people perceive or desire their privacy to be-and what can actually be done by others-like ll- to really protect it may not always coincide. Which goes back to your point about what ll thinks private and public actually is. I don't think any of us knows the answer to that-we can only guess. Given recent events I'm not convinced ll even knows what their opinion on it is either.

19 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Strikes me that the majority of the ones arguing against any restrictions of bots and/or limitations of the scripting that allows the scraping, are IT people who are mostly scripters and coders themselves. Almost like they put function over privacy. I sense it is that more at play here rather than whether the ToS has been read sufficiently or not.

I hope none of my posts have come across as if I am against restrictions-as I am definitely not. I think there needs to be some. I am realistic about what they can or should be-and that may differ from others' opinions but I still think they need to exist. My experience and knowledge lends a lot to what I know about privacy and data-including the collection storage and use of that data. I know what people with bad ideas can and will do with bits of data-personally identifying and not-and I also know that people do often think their own data is more protected than it really is. That knowledge and experience colors some of my opinions-but not to the point that I think no privacy should be afforded or data protected. 

That said it is very clear the tos isn't read and my own experience also tells me without a doubt it often goes unread  by a lot of people. My own experience with people not reading it is definitely generational-but that's anecdotal entirely and probably not indicative of widespread truth beyond it. Rowan already posted some parts of the tos people thought weren't there-I imagine there's a lot more people have never read. It's pretty much the nature of long winded terms and contracts that most of it will never be read by those who agree to them. 

[Quartz Mole]

29 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

I'd give you odds that if I were to post a screenshot of some interesting inworld Profile, my post would get deleted quite quickly as a result. It's public but not within the Forum and therefore by precedent, not really "public".

It would depend on the the context, I think.   We remove posts for many reasons, of course -- that they're off-topic, for example, or they constitute harassment, or they're part of a personal dispute.    

[benchthis]

1 hour ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

This is precisely why I don't share any of my RL art in SL. I have no expectation that someone won't simply snap the pic of it on my gallery wall and make their own version (though for $1.25 in RL money is sell them for, their time isn't worth much if they do).

And then they turn around and attack you for infringement on your original art. 

Maybe in the future someone will invent a program artists may use to upload their art to to put in special watermarks that will become active anytime a snip or copy is performed to the original. Those images can be used for profiles and galleries. 

Philip Rosedale said recently "We have a bad time coming, in the next say 10 years" "We don't yet have machines that are 1000s of times smarter than us that could help us not hurt each other, but we do have machines powerful enough to help us hurt each other. 

Edited April 8, 2023 by benchthis

[Ags Falconer]

On 3/30/2023 at 6:07 PM, Rick Nightingale said:

Let's face it - if someone runs a (unregistered) bot on their own land for their own purposes - who cares or knows?

If it wanders where it hasn't been invited...

+ huge points for referencing Blade Runner!!

[Jennifer Boyle]

I'm surprised that the people talking about intellectual property rights have ignored that under the TOS LL has an unlimited license to do anything they please with anything that is uploaded into SL.

[Ceka Cianci]

4 hours ago, EliseAnne85 said:

I don't really see the harm in LL amending the TOS to something like, let's say - First of all, declaring their template to make SL profiles a Trade Marked copyright (not to be copied without permission), but to also give users the right to have to give consent if a third party wants to use the photographs, poems or lyrics contained in their personal profile and publish them on a third party website.  It would just be a formality to declare those IP, but the individual would still have to take care of it on their own.  

You can do that without them having to change the TOS already.. Once it is outside of SL,  it's out of their hands anyways.. If it's content you created, you can already go after someone that takes it, on your own..

If you take a photo in SL and save it to your disk, do whatever in photoshop, then upload it to the internet, or in this case Second life, you have a record of creating it..now it's just a matter of the laws with how strong of a case you will have..

The permissions get set up by the creator as well as getting the trademarking and copyright..

Everything is already there to do what you are asking them to do for you.

ETA: Just to add, Copyright happens the moment you create something because the original file is dated.

Edited April 8, 2023 by Ceka Cianci

[EliseAnne85]

46 minutes ago, Jennifer Boyle said:

I'm surprised that the people talking about intellectual property rights have ignored that under the TOS LL has an unlimited license to do anything they please with anything that is uploaded into SL.

We give LL that permission when we agree.  It's unknown third parties taking it from our profiles I'm talking about.  

[Paul Hexem]

22 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

So here it comes to the crux of the matter. Should SL leave vulnerabilities in place for the sake of not breaking existing content and/or the potential future creations that might result from them? LL would certainly not be the first to have to roll back features because they wound up exposing security issues. Justifying the leaving them in place for the dubious benefit of content that relies on it seems a slippery slope and one sure to have future ramifications.

 

21 hours ago, EliseAnne85 said:

Okay, say the lsl script for data collection is gone, which it should be because any and all harvesting could contain our own personal artworks or writings (poems, lyrics) which may be copyright protected, how would this particular script have made our lives better?  

Let me just give an example:  Let's say my profile has original artworks by me and poems written by me.  How would the harvesting and third party publishing of those I put on a SL inworld profile make our SL's better?

To add on to what @Innula Zenovkasaid, we're not talking about breaking a little old content, we're talking about breaking a huge portion of current SL. Vehicles, pets, HUDs, mesh bodies, security systems, countless stuff we can't even think checks that info ... We might as well shut SL down if we go that route.

[M Peccable]

5 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

We give LL that permission when we agree.  It's unknown third parties taking it from our profiles I'm talking about.  

I'm not sure that's right. Doesn't LL OWN everything that has been created and/or uploaded, instead of being licensed to LL by the creator? If so, since they own it, they really don't need any permissions from us.

It seems that would also call into question what we could do about it if "our" intellectual property  was scraped from SL and uploaded somewhere it shouldn't be. Since LL owns it, not us, wouldn't it have to be them taking any actions?

[EliseAnne85]

17 minutes ago, Paul Hexem said:

 

To add on to what @Innula Zenovkasaid, we're not talking about breaking a little old content, we're talking about breaking a huge portion of current SL. Vehicles, pets, HUDs, mesh bodies, security systems, countless stuff we can't even think checks that info ... We might as well shut SL down if we go that route.

Yeah, I know.  I realize that now because me, Innula and one other person were all posting at the same time, and I said after reading what Innula wrote, we painted ourselves into a corner.  

What I'm saying is Innula and I were posting at the same time, so it only looks like I posted after her but that is not exactly the case here since we posted at the same time.  

Edited April 8, 2023 by EliseAnne85

[EliseAnne85]

3 minutes ago, M Peccable said:

I'm not sure that's right. Doesn't LL OWN everything that has been created and/or uploaded, instead of being licensed to LL by the creator? If so, since they own it, they really don't need any permissions from us.

It seems that would also call into question what we could do about it if "our" intellectual property  was scraped from SL and uploaded somewhere it shouldn't be. Since LL owns it, not us, wouldn't it have to be them taking any actions?

Well, I don't have the whole TOS in my head right now plus I'm working at the moment.

I, believe, what it means, is LL has a right to do with the LL content as they see fit, and also LL retains the right to break any content too, among other things like shut down completely and they owe us nothing if they close.  

[Ceka Cianci]

4 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

We give LL that permission when we agree.  It's unknown third parties taking it from our profiles I'm talking about.  

Yes but you also are given the warnings of how it is not safe to display anything you aren't willing to lose..

This is why they'll never get rid of the warning that covers them and why profiles are considered public..

It keeps the burden of protection on the creator or owner of the property..

When you place something on your profile, you are giving everyone in the world permission to view it copy it and open it up for abuse.

Uploading it to SL you gave LL permission, opening up to the world by putting your creation on your profile, you the creator removed the expectation or shield of protection of the content.

That's why they'll never shift that responsibility onto themselves..

 

[EliseAnne85]

9 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:

That's why they'll never shift that responsibility onto themselves..

I never said they should put that burden upon themselves though.

I said perhaps they could amend the TOS regarding profiles and formalize that they may contain IP content.  Therefore, they could write, 'any third party publishing data from our users does so at their own risk {because} they may contain IP content'.  

You know, something not too spectacular but a little something to ward off these kinds of harvests again and spare us all of this happening again.  

I have just been trying to look at all the bases here to see how we can prevent this in the future.

I had thought of getting rid of the 'getOBJECTdetails' script myself until Innula explained how this is not a viable option.  

Edited April 8, 2023 by EliseAnne85

[Rowan Amore]

3 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

 

As an example I would bet that even though the information contained within a profile is supposedly "public" I'd give you odds that if I were to post a screenshot of some interesting inworld Profile, my post would get deleted quite quickly as a result. It's public but not within the Forum and therefore by precedent, not really "public". That its allowance is contained within the ToS itself is probably no more then the Lab covering it's butt in case it does.

 

They would more.than likely remove it, as they have done long before the current fervor, because of their own policy about naming anyone for any reason on the forums, IMO.  I.can't even post a name which certainly isn't private.

3 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Isn't it likely then that it is a requirement by some jurisdictions?

Concerning tagging someone in a photo?  Maybe you can look that up.  Snapping a pic of a random stranger in the background and not tagging?  Less likely.  Even countries that have some restrictions on consent for photos, don't disallow people in photos in public as.long as they aren't the focus of the picture.

ETA...since I was just looking through the picture sections of the forums, it seems they allow pictures of random avatars in the background visible in a public place...sort of like.profiles.  

Edited April 8, 2023 by Rowan Amore

[Love Zhaoying]

Recent poster said (paraphrasing) LL can do whatever they want with our data. While the TOS / TOC may not have a specific clause, I certainly hope LL would "never sell our data".

[Rowan Amore]

3 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Recent poster said (paraphrasing) LL can do whatever they want with our data. While the TOS / TOC may not have a specific clause, I certainly hope LL would "never sell our data".

They don't sell it but...read #3 in the Privacy Policy.  And that's RL info, just sayin'.

[Ceka Cianci]

1 minute ago, EliseAnne85 said:

I never said they should put that burden upon themselves though.

I said perhaps they could amend the TOS regarding profiles and formalize that they may contain IP content.  Therefore, they could write, any third party publishing data from our users does so at their own risk {because} they may contain IP content.  

You know, something not too spectacular but a little something to ward off these kinds of harvests again and spare us all of this.  

I have just been trying to look at all the bases here to see how we can prevent this in the future.

I had thought of getting rid of the 'getOBJECTdetails' script myself until Innula explained how this is not a viable option.  

Me using profiles was just an example, but really it is the whole platform.. Also it was only one side of the warning.. they have the content creator side, but also they speak to those ones that would take what isn't theirs..

The most they could do is what they did with the newly added wiki page about personal data and link from the TOS to the wiki about content theft.. otherwise it's all pretty much in the TOS and linked..

[EliseAnne85]

13 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:

Me using profiles was just an example, but really it is the whole platform.. Also it was only one side of the warning.. they have the content creator side, but also they speak to those ones that would take what isn't theirs..

The most they could do is what they did with the newly added wiki page about personal data and link from the TOS to the wiki about content theft.. otherwise it's all pretty much in the TOS and linked..

Is it linked on the main SL website page?  I cannot find it at the moment and am working at the moment.  

It's in the Scripted Agent Policy Wiki.  I don't see where the Scripted Agent Policy is linked on the main SL webpage?

This is the bit you are talking about in the Scripted Agent Policy:  (I'd assume that the below would be linked to the main website sooner rather than later.)   I guess it's good enough.  It will have to do.  

Personal Data and Privacy Rights

Data transferred outside of the Second Life service or its supporting websites is not exempt from protection under applicable data privacy laws. This applies whether data is collected by Scripted Agents, LSL scripts, or external tools. Access to the Second Life service and access to Personal Data of Second Life Residents are both conditioned on adherence to all applicable global privacy regulations governing the collection, storage, processing, or transmission of Personal Data. These laws include Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). We recommend that you seek guidance from a privacy attorney for additional, updated information before using Personal Data of Second Life Residents outside of Second Life.

Edited April 8, 2023 by EliseAnne85

[Ceka Cianci]

25 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Concerning tagging someone in a photo?  Maybe you can look that up.  Snapping a pic of a random stranger in the background and not tagging?  Less likely.  Even countries that have some restrictions on consent for photos, don't disallow people in photos in public as.long as they aren't the focus of the picture.

A good example  would be with say, Youtube videos..

Someone is walking the public streets of Chicago or New York and videoing themself from their phone as they are walking and talking about something  for a vlog..

While they are videoing themselves all kinds of people are walking into frame  of the video, Some even doing a video version of a photobomb..

The one taking the video of themself doesn't need to get permission from any of them before uploading the video to youtube..  Not even the ones photobombing, because they put themselves in the video willingly to be noticed.. For all they know , the person was live streaming..

Someone walking through a public street of a city stopping people putting them on video and asking questions, will have to get consent agreements signed before uploading..

[Love Zhaoying]

25 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

They don't sell it but...read #3 in the Privacy Policy.  And that's RL info, just sayin'.

The only Privacy Policy link I see on this page is for Tilia. That one, or is there another one that you mean?

[Rowan Amore]

Just now, Love Zhaoying said:

The only Privacy Policy link I see on this page is for Tilia. That one, or is there another one that you mean?

Its at the very bottom of this page in blue

https://www.lindenlab.com/privacy

[Love Zhaoying]

6 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

Its at the very bottom of this page in blue

https://www.lindenlab.com/privacy

Not quite as mind-numbing as the similar information for Tilia.

[Ceka Cianci]

35 minutes ago, EliseAnne85 said:

Is it linked on the main SL website page?  I cannot find it at the moment and am working at the moment.  

It's in the Scripted Agent Policy Wiki.  I don't see where the Scripted Agent Policy is linked on the main SL webpage?

This is the bit you are talking about in the Scripted Agent Policy:  (I'd assume that the below would be linked to the main website sooner rather than later.)   I guess it's good enough.  It will have to do.  

Personal Data and Privacy Rights

Data transferred outside of the Second Life service or its supporting websites is not exempt from protection under applicable data privacy laws. This applies whether data is collected by Scripted Agents, LSL scripts, or external tools. Access to the Second Life service and access to Personal Data of Second Life Residents are both conditioned on adherence to all applicable global privacy regulations governing the collection, storage, processing, or transmission of Personal Data. These laws include Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). We recommend that you seek guidance from a privacy attorney for additional, updated information before using Personal Data of Second Life Residents outside of Second Life.

 

The main thing I was referring to  as, the other side of the story is more to do with SL in general and intellectual property rights, but more talking to those that would say, take someones content..

In the main section of the policy they more show it as meaning the whole platform to cover everything within..

They can make aware to people joining, that users do actually own things in second life and that there is real world consequences when someone takes someone else's property..

The only ones they will scare with the rules will be the ones looking to abide by the rules..

The ones that  are looking to take things and break things.. The ones that are good at those things, probably know they rules better than most.. Not because they want to respect them, but to know how to do things without getting caught or in trouble..

Some of the most informed people of the law in the real world are the law breakers. Some of the most educated lawyers Legal advisors are convicts.

We could plaster the information every 10 meters across the grid and it wouldn't slow anyone down, other than the ones looking to follow them..

 

 

Edited April 8, 2023 by Ceka Cianci
Crossed out Lawyers and put in Legal advisors