Community Standards changes toothless without common sense

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.

There’s still the issue of collecting information without consent, now there has to be a degree of common sense applied here, some people may abuse the information they receive, as could I on this site, I can see IP addresses and we do ask people to leave an email address, although some of you make one up! However unless you’re a complete numpty during commenting, I don’t really mind.

However, there are issues, if the purpose of your collection of data inworld is to share information with others, be that inworld or outside, then consent should be sought, now we know some people aren’t going to play ball and when those people don’t play ball, Linden Lab don’t need to point to the community standards, they don’t need to point to the terms of service either, they just need to act, because with all the best will in the world, having a device on sale inworld, that is used inworld, that is sharing information without consent on a third party website is in all reality, circumventing the terms of service, rather than following the spirit of the terms of service.

Let’s put this in a Redzone context, Theia Magic has reported that Zfire stated on the Redzone forums:

“Hello RedZone owners.
After talking with Linden Labs over the past month we have reached an agreement.
Effective now and retroactively the RedZone system will request Consent to display alt name information.
LL policy will reflect this change by tomorrow the 25th.
The zRZ HUD will now request consent much like a bloodlines bite.
The zRZ Website now offers a system to send an IM to request consent for a zF RedZone Alt Background check.
The system is already in place, new functions and consent methods will be offered as we discover how best to implement this feature.
Linden Labs has been good enough to suggest many ideas that settled on this one.
Alt names can still be viewed to settle disputes, run security background checks etc.”

This leaves a few unanswered questions, yes it is good that the hud seeks consent like a bloodlines bite, but what about the main system that people put on their parcels, is that still scanning and sharing without consent? The Hud was one aspect of this device that people felt was really uncalled for, a Redzone user posted here that the Hud is really for remote management, but it still revealed alt information inworld, that therefore was pretty hard to defend as not being in breach of the TOS, but the main system, will that seek consent?

I’ve said this more than once, but if the device sought consent and informed people of what data was being collected, no matter how disgusting some folk felt the device was, it would at least be showing a modicum of respect for user choice and the concepts of opting in, if the main system is allowed to scan and share data without consent, this change in community standards remains pretty toothless because Redzone isn’t the only scanning device and others will follow. People will abuse the media system, it wasn’t intended for this sort of information and whilst many people have been unaware of this situation, little has been said about the exploit. However now that many people know about the exploit Linden Lab can no longer pretend this is a security through obscurity issue.

Linden Lab and Zfire do appear to have had some sort of conversation on this issue and that is very welcome, but this system should be encouraged to always seek consent, whatever guise it is in, it’s not enough to just ask them to seek consent via the hud, if the main system is seeking consent when placed on parcels, then that will be a positive move, if it doesn’t need to, then we haven’t moved very far along at all.

I will await further developments here, there’s too much information around now for the issue to be swept under the carpet, but I can hope that a sensible and ethical solution will be applied here which will set a good example for future issues.

I’m also hoping the issue is resolved quickly so I can talk about Elves, Fairies, Boobs, Search, More Boobs, Dragons, Orcs, Shopping and more fun stuff!