The Redzone Challenge

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.

I’m still waiting for a sensible defence of why Redzone doesn’t warn people what’s happening when they enter a Redzone enabled parcel or sim. When I go shopping in RL I see signs telling me security cameras are in operation, this is done for two reasons, one is to inform you they are there and potentially filming you, the other is to act as a deterrent. However any store in the land would be in trouble if they installed hidden cameras in say, the ladies changing rooms, heck they’d be in trouble if they weren’t hidden, but the way Redzone works right now, it’s a hidden camera that doesn’t alert users about its purposes.

Consent goes a long way to making Redzone a more ethical product, of course there will still be question marks about its use and people not remotely interested in whether consent is sought or not, will still want the product and others of its ilk, banned, but Redzone itself can go some way to trying to prove it’s not a snooping tool, by seeking consent.

As Redzone stores and shares data about avatars, they should do what any ethical company does in such circumstances, inform people of what’s going on, that’s why Linden Lab have a privacy policy explaining what happens with your data, because it’s the right thing to do when you’re storing data of this nature.

Redzone should also move to a system that doesn’t reveal alts, even to its users. Rumour has it that Redzone customers can remove their own alts from the database, I don’t know if this is true as I don’t use the system, but it would say a lot about the ethics of a Redzone user if they removed their own alts, that would be another signal that something is wrong with the system. There is no need for Redzone to reveal alts, if its aim is to ban what they deem as alts, they don’t need to reveal the names of the alts to do that.

So will Redzone users inform visitors of what the system does or are they going to continue trying to hide the device until such time as it becomes pretty damn useless due to third party viewer patches? If people don’t mind being scanned and their details shared, they will happily say yes to being on the Redzone database and they won’t be bothered about third party viewers that are looking to stop this snooping, any Redzone users prepared to do it?