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New Feature: Scripted Agent Estate Access Discussion


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4 minutes ago, Gwin LeShelle said:

My whole takeaway from this is ...a tad of frustration.

I am premium plus, no I don't want to brag ...but I pay more than the normal premium user, that can have their full land allowance covered by getting a Linden Home.

So I went for Mainland, that I even had to pay for of course. Because still no 2048 LHs...and I feel like getting punished for being paying extra 😂 and I bet I am not the only PP user frustrated by that move.

And I bet many are thinking about downgrading now, so LL should find a solution. Fast.

Because paying users are not only on the LHs regions to be found.

Sorry, this relates to the scripted agent discussion how? Because we on mainland do not get the new feature? That's my only guess.

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5 hours ago, xDancingStarx said:

So you're saying that someone who wants to run a bot (who you are scared of may be a bad actor) and has to decide between a) not registering it and getting it potentially banned after x days and b) registering it to have the recent restrictions apply plus additionally to pay money for it is going to opt for 2)? And those people who opt for 2 they better think about what they do? I have a really hard time following that train of thought.

Because you don't want to pay for having a bot, or because you don't want to register them? Not sure what part confuses you.

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5 hours ago, Soft Linden said:

They can pry the 8 megs of resizing and retexturing scripts out of my cold, dead 250-prim hands…

I was going to use them in a pretty star-shaped pattern in a HUD! Holding them in your hands may keep you out of trouble though. You know what they say about idle hands! 

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50 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Sorry, this relates to the scripted agent  discussion how? Because we on mainland do not get the new feature? That's my only guess.

Yeah indeed thats why and really after reading some of the last posts by you and others my post contributed way more to the topic of this thread so you asking passive aggressively is contributing to the topic exactly how?😂

Sorry not in the mood to play nice today.

Next time I talk about star-shaped HUD's and my feelings about them too :)

Edited by Gwin LeShelle
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1 hour ago, Alwin Alcott said:

disclaimer at the parcel border "if you enter, you agree with your name to be send to owner"... and add a bit more txt, by the time they read it the minimum of  10 sec will be reached and booted.

I know you aren't serious, but for the sake of the discussion, where 90% of people are interested in it in a constructive way, it needs to be made 100% clear that a disclaimer like "if you enter" is not compliant with privacy laws.

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54 minutes ago, Gwin LeShelle said:

Yeah indeed thats why and really after reading some of the last posts by you and others my post contributed way more to the topic of this thread so you asking passive aggressively is contributing to the topic exactly how?😂

Sorry not in the mood to play nice today.

Next time I talk about star-shaped HUD's and my feelings about them too :)

Goodness, sorry. People complain so much, for so many reasons, about P+ etc. that sometimes it is hard to track the specifics.

Edited by Love Zhaoying
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Parcel level tools for bot access will not work.

A scripted agent simply needs to be anywhere on the sim to perform the tasks it does so someone having the ability to deny scripted agent access to their parcel on that sim will not deny said scripted agent from gathering data on every item and person in their parcel.

Granted it can be used to prevent them from accessing the parcel itself but it will not stop their - other - activities.

This is a huge issue for anyone who owns land on the mainland. Many want the same privacy as has been made available to those on private islands and linden homes but many businesses based on the mainland use bots and should not be punished.

I do not foresee scripted agents being banned from the mainland unless LL gives notice of that happening and relocates established businesses who use scripted agents (greeter bots, models etc.) to alternative scripted agent friendly locations at no additional cost to the customer.

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11 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Goodness, sorry. People complain so much, for so many reasons, about P+ etc. that sometimes it is hard to track the specifics.

I never complained about it before. I love it. I went P+ the day it was released and never looked back 😂 and I personally wouldn't change it.

But I bet many are feeling betrayed ...the SL people bunch is like more dramatic than a Spanish telenovela.

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26 minutes ago, Randy Pole said:

Parcel level tools for bot access will not work.

A scripted agent simply needs to be anywhere on the sim to perform the tasks it does so someone having the ability to deny scripted agent access to their parcel on that sim will not deny said scripted agent from gathering data on every item and person in their parcel.

Granted it can be used to prevent them from accessing the parcel itself but it will not stop their - other - activities.

This is a huge issue for anyone who owns land on the mainland. Many want the same privacy as has been made available to those on private islands and linden homes but many businesses based on the mainland use bots and should not be punished.

I do not foresee scripted agents being banned from the mainland unless LL gives notice of that happening and relocates established businesses who use scripted agents (greeter bots, models etc.) to alternative scripted agent friendly locations at no additional cost to the customer.

There's two levels here:

1) Denying access to parcel for physical privacy reasons. I don't want bots physically entering my parcel. It's annoying. This is actually more important to me than the data privacy concerns. (Because, I trust LL to help deal with those one way or another, or my Norton / LifeLock etc. will, etc. etc.)
2) Preventing access for data privacy reasons. I agree with you on this point with regard to parcel access - bots can still "detect me" if they are close enough to my parcel. 

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9 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Thanks. I'm done for the night, carry on and fight the good fight!

3 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Because you don't want to pay for having a bot, or because you don't want to register them? Not sure what part confuses you.

I'm not sure what fight you're fighting in these forums, and why you imply that, when I ask why a bad actor would register a bot in the first place, it is me who doesn't want to pay for a bot or doesn't want to register them. This is the same level as people being accused of being part of BB because they may bring up arguments in their favour. It may be tough to imagine but people can actually try to see all of the perspectives without fighting a some kind of ideological fight.

Furthermore this especially p****** me off since I very early took a stance in these forums pro privacy rights, quoting myself from January.

"In general, an automated process to copy lots of Avatar-related data, store it outside of SL, and importantly, make it public for everyone, with nobody having control over it, shouldn't be in the interest of SL."

"Therefore I would welcome if avatar's privacy rights are actually recognized by Linden, at least to some extend (which the argument "can be collected by scripts so it's allowed" contradicts in my opinion)"

That doesn't mean that I cannot see or do not want to see the other side of it.

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15 hours ago, bunboxmomo said:

GridSurvey has been running for over a decade with no monetisation.
This is true for pretty much all the bot networks.

Bot network owners need to ask themselves more often what kind of data harvesting is and what isn't beneficial for the grid.
Personalized data storage on websites or private servers is never beneficial in my book and potential dangerous for the individual users of Secondlife.

There are a gazillion badboys and badgirls out there trying to harvest and combine information from all over the web. From that moment on we are no longer talking about those a bit too enthusiastic fellow SL-ers who gather date because they can, but people who want to monetize (in bad ways) what they find and combine all over the world.

Because one needs a SL related hobby and because one can are both no real valid reasons to do so IMHO.

Edited by Sid Nagy
It is my Saturday hobby to edit my texts.
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1 hour ago, NARF Wonder said:

This NEEDS to be a thing for ALL of SL. I have a premium home and get about 10 bonniebots poofing in in a day. PLEASE make this available for everyone who has land of any kind. OR just remove bots outright. They serve no real purpose.

I totally agree with you that it needs to be available to all of SL, but I disagree with you that bots "serve no real purpose". There are many perfectly good uses of bots, as stated by LL. I can accept that they serve no useful purpose for you personally, but that's quite different.

Incidentally, LL can't "just remove bots outright" because they have no way programatically discerning which avatars are bots and which aren't.

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3 minutes ago, Phil Deakins said:

I totally agree with you that it needs to be available to all of SL, but I disagree with you that bots "serve no real purpose". There are many perfectly good uses of bots, as stated by LL. I can accept that they serve no useful purpose for you personally, but that's quite different.

Incidentally, LL can't "just remove bots outright" because they have no way programatically discerning which avatars are bots and which aren't.

That we know of

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31 minutes ago, xDancingStarx said:

I'm not sure what fight you're fighting in these forums, and why you imply that, when I ask why a bad actor would register a bot in the first place, it is me who doesn't want to pay for a bot or doesn't want to register them. [...]

In the course of this thread, my views have completely shifted. I'm now pretty convinced that roaming bots are overwhelmingly run by "bad actors". And that there are only a tiny share of roaming bots that are run for the good of Second Life. (Tyche is one I'd trust. Others… maybe.)

And now that I see the volume of bots and how much trouble they can cause by simply appearing over the neighbor's parcel, I have grave doubts about a parcel level ban (even though I proposed one on jira). Personally, I'm not so concerned with privacy of any data I share on SL, so I figured just keep 'em off any parcels where the owners judge them to be a problem, and good enough for Mainland. I don't think so anymore: there are simply too many, so many that they cause trouble in a region no matter where they land.

We need a policy that ends up starving out about 95% of the current crop of roaming bots. And as much as I love what Tyche has done for us for all these years, if bots are all or nothing, I'd now choose nothing.

And while I may not care about Mainland privacy, I now appreciate that the Lab has no choice but to be concerned about privacy on the platform—and I'm not really seeing how the Mainland is somehow exempt from those concerns.

So, I'm now convinced they don't need a checkbox at all, and it shouldn't be up to Estates whether scripted agents are banned. They all should be banned everywhere, except those granted roaming rights by the Lab. I hate to think it's come to this, and I hate special exceptions, and these would mean a bunch of extra overhead and LindeX fees will have to increase again or whatever, but the swelling ranks of the roaming bots aren't going to dwindle voluntarily.* They simply gotta go.

It may be time to devise "good enough bot" criteria to earn the exemption. Mine would be very strict: they'd have to make public every bit of data they collect. (The exception would be data volunteered by its owner for collection, possibly in exchange for subscription payment by the bot to have access to that data. And bots would rarely be needed to collect that sort of data.)

___________________
*Probably the bots won't die off because something is currently causing them to multiply. I could wait a month to see if the herd thins markedly after the current measures. Also, I can not come up with any explanation for this current explosion in roaming bot population. Economically it's completely absurd: there are so many now that the total value of the SL economy, divided by the number of bots, probably wouldn't pay to cool a bot's worth of computing. A tiny paranoid corner of my brain whispers "psst. false flag. more bots to force bigger badder bot bans." Meanwhile a larger corner whispers "these new bot runners are dumb as bags of rocks."

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35 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

Personalized data storage on websites or private servers is never beneficial in my book and potential dangerous for the individual users of Secondlife.

The rules are already applying to the "processing" of data, meaning that the data doesn't even need to be stored for the rules to apply. But even when it's about saving data I have no problem to imagine legitimate use cases. For example, what about redelivery systems? I can well imagine that they're processing at least the UUID outside of SL without prior consent. And how do you want to solve that? Disallowing the user to buy an item before they have clicked an "I agree" button? Force them to rely on LSL alone? What about security systems that want to give the owner the opportunity to control the access list via web? What if they enter a UUID on the web to have the security system allow or disallow that user? In that moment you're processing a UUID outside of SL. I'm sure there are lots of legitimate use cases, and while I'm all pro privacy rights, I can see the risk of substantial issues.

Edited by xDancingStarx
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12 minutes ago, xDancingStarx said:

The rules are already applying to the "processing" of data, meaning that the data doesn't even need to be stored for the rules to apply. But even when it's about saving data I have no problem to imagine legitimate use cases. For example, what about redelivery systems? I can well imagine that they're processing at least the UUID outside of SL without prior consent. And how do you want to solve that? Disallowing the user to buy an item before they have clicked an "I agree" button? Force them to rely on LSL alone? What about security systems that want to give the owner the opportunity to control the access list via web? What if they enter a UUID on the web to have the security system allow or disallow that user? In that moment you're processing a UUID outside of SL. I'm sure there are lots of legitimate use cases, and while I'm all pro privacy rights, I can see the risk of substantial issues.

That's why I find it a real good thing that the biggest of the redelivery systems (CasperVent) is now under the roof with Linden Lab itself. It might be a good idea in the long term to merge that with the redeliver system used on the Marketplace so that all the data stay under the responsibility of Linden Lab.

And about agree buttons... no problems with that.
At the moment one has to click a button already before one gets the goods delivered from for instance CasperVend.

There are already agree buttons in SL.  Agree to animate your avatar , agree to display your profile picture, agree to use your L$ (vending machines), why not "Agree to store your UUID" and or username outside of Secondlife?

It is becoming a common practice on websites as well to ask permissions and not for nothing.
Safety of ones personal data should  concern everybody.

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1 minute ago, Sid Nagy said:

That's why I find it a real good thing that the biggest of the redelivery systems (CasperVent) is now under the roof with Linden Lab itself.

Being allowed to process and store data outside of SL without prior consent hasn't hindered Casper from becoming this big. Lucky for them since this new policy would create lots and lots of issues otherwise. And yet, if this example alone doesn't prove legitimate reasons then I don't know.

 

1 minute ago, Sid Nagy said:

And about agree buttons... no problems with that.
At the moment one has to click a button already before one gets the goods delivered from for instance CasperVend.

Not really, though. The data must be processed and saved during the time of purchase, which means that you have to click before you purchase. Hence my question, do you wanna disallow the user to buy an item before he has clicked the the "I agree" button? I'm just curious how this is supposed to look like.

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12 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

That's why I find it a real good thing that the biggest of the redelivery systems (CasperVent) is now under the roof with Linden Lab itself. It might be a good idea in the long term to merge that with the redeliver system used on the Marketplace so that all the data stay under the responsibility of Linden Lab.

And about agree buttons... no problems with that.
At the moment one has to click a button already before one gets the goods delivered from for instance CasperVend.

There are already agree buttons in SL.  Agree to animate your avatar , agree to display your profile picture, agree to use your L$ (vending machines), why not "Agree to store your UUID" and or username outside of Secondlife?

It is becoming a common practice on websites as well to ask permissions and not for nothing.
Safety of ones personal data should  concern everybody.

Wouldn't it be great if Bots had to ask every avatar permission before scanning them to collect data? Complete with a dialog that blocks your screen until you select Allow, Deny, or Ignore (standard permissions dialog).

No, I am not being sarcastic.

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Unpopular position follows..

One use for Bots / Scripted Agents which I did not notice discussed in this thread: the benign "What users are wearing" survey bots. They are used to determine which Mesh Bodies and Heads are actually being used vs. purchased. 

My (probably unpopular) position is that these Bots don't really benefit anyone besides "creators"; creators benefit by knowing which bodies / heads / etc. are "trending", because they can create more for those "new" and/or existing bodies which may generate more purchase of their skins, rigged clothing, etc.

My opinion is that any other claims of "who benefits" from knowing the "trending" data is just a game at best, or "the tail wagging the dog" at worst.

I am willing to concede that this class of "data survey" bots is "benign" in that it has no reason to collect individuals' data, except to ensure they are not "counted twice".

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  • Moles

Folks, the Community Participation Guidelines say

We want to foster an honest and open exchange of ideas on our community pages; to do that, we want to encourage all participants to maintain an atmosphere of courtesy and respect for others at all times. Creating a constructive place for conversation will help us build a strong, better informed community in Second Life, and make both our communication channels and our world a more supportive and engaging place for all.

It would really help if people would refrain from making sweeping and speculative generalisations about the intelligence, knowledge, and motives of anyone so misguided that they're on the opposite side in this discussion.   

It's not going to persuade anyone who doesn't already agree and serves only to rile up the opposition, which makes more work for the moderators as we try to clean up the resulting mess, drives off people who want to engage in a sensible discussion, and will eventually get the thread locked, as has happened with all the other threads.

 

Edited by Quartz Mole
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23 minutes ago, Quartz Mole said:

It would really help if people would refrain from making sweeping and speculative generalisations about the intelligence, knowledge, and motives about anyone so misguided that they're on the opposite side in this discussion. 

Thanks, Quartz! I ("we") can do/be better.

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