Month: February 2011

There has been an unannounced change to the community standards, which can be read here. The main point people have noticed so far is with regards to disclosure:

Disclosure

Residents are entitled to a reasonable level of privacy with regard to their Second Life experience. Sharing personal information about your fellow Residents without their consent — including gender, religion, age, marital status, race, sexual preference, alternate account names, and real-world location beyond what is provided by them in their Resident profile — is not allowed. Remotely monitoring conversations in Second Life, posting conversation logs, or sharing conversation logs without the participants’ consent are all prohibited.

Now before people start popping the champagne corks thinking this means the end of Redzone, think again, because without Linden Lab applying some common sense and moderation, things haven’t changed that much at all.

Continue reading “Community Standards changes toothless without common sense”

Whilst I still personally believe Redzone should be banned, for those who feel Redzone is an ethical tool, aimed solely at reducing the risk of grieifng and copybotting, I challenge them to do the ethical thing here and set aside a landing point that fully informs potential visitors and customers of their sims and stores of exactly what will happen with their data once they enter a Redzone enabled parcel.

One of the arguments set forth by Redzone users has been that those who oppose the system are copybotters, or people who want to grief, suggesting therefore that honest to goodness people will have no problem whatsoever with sharing the data that Redzone thrives upon. Therefore let’s put this to the test, inform people that the system will scan them, try to match them to alts, that the information can be retrieved by other Redzone users and that their alts can be revealed, if Redzone users are correct, the vast majority of people won’t mind at all, they’d also be seeking consent for use of the system, ticking an ethical usage box.

Continue reading “The Redzone Challenge”

As Second Life evolves, new issues will arise and the recent rumpus about Redzone is one of those issues. The point with Redzone is that it scans you,without consent, without informing you that you are going to be scanned, there is no mention of what Redzone does with your data, there is no privacy policy with this device and that’s where we get into a bit of a sticky wicket.

Linden Lab so far have taken no action and to be fair to Linden Lab, how do they incorporate a policy to ban Redzone without making legitimate uses of IP addresses illegal too? Linden Lab move slowly on issues, very slowly, they could of course decide to just ban Redzone as they have in the past banned traffic gaming devices, but without a clear policy, enforcement becomes tricky when the next Redzone arrives. The starting point for Linden Lab’s policy of course lies with the terms of service.

Continue reading “Redzone, Privacy And Maturing Virtual Worlds”