We need the ability to moderate Scripted Agents on the parcel level
Skullphern Resident
Basically, bots entering and leaving sims are only able to do so, because they have a landing point within the sim, and since currently it is only able to be set in REGION administration, this means anyone in a mainland parcel has no chance to ever moderate scripted agents from not entering, cataloging, and recording their names, attachments, position, friends, etc.
Im sure if everyone was able to simply turn on a setting that says "Must not be a scripted agent" for parcel access, we'd see far fewer tracking bots.
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William Gide
Related to this, a lot of us do not want to deal with AI slop avatars, such as those created by the Character Designer. Simply keeping scripted agents out of my parcels is an easy first step, which other aspects of this feedback can be built on.
Arrehn Oberlander
why not prevent scripted agents from being able to see objects and avatars inside a parcel at all where they don't have rights to enter, for example not even detect if any avatars inside the parcel are present on the region. I think what people are really asking for is a "Stop allowing anonymous third parties to scrape my (meta)data without my consent" button, because data scraping at bot-enabled scales and speeds can lead to a number of real harms.
Peter Stindberg
As long as a bot can reach even a single 4x4 parcel on your region, it can carry out its task. There's a few threads on this running right now with lots of information on the issue, please check those out.
Beatrice Voxel
Peter Stindberg That's the problem, the bots are not limited to parcels or restricted from what the viewers will display to anyone. If the bot isn't registered as a scripted agent, no restrictions on scripted agents will apply to it - which completely defeats the "scripted agent" flag because no bot operator would willingly gimp their workforce.
LL needs to step up, and make unflagged bots completely unwelcome. I'm sure that if they wanted to, they could figure out tools and methodology of not only identifying a scripted agent based on behavior and data sent to/from, but also backtrack to the operators, and hit them with DCMA's for abuse of LL's proprietary systems. But apparently that's out of their scope, or something.
Peter Stindberg
Beatrice Voxel From my bot protector network, I can say that about 0,5% bots are not flagged as such. So the rogue (or "red", as I call them) bots are a small problem.
The main issue is: if any bot, rogue or rightfully registered, gets anywhere on a region, it could do its task.
Parcel-level banning either via official support or via 3rd party "privacy" tools, make absolutely no sense.
Beatrice Voxel
Peter Stindberg I'm not for parcel-banning to prevent them from scanning, I'm for parcel-banning specifically to keep them out of my space. They're messing with my Zen just by showing up, regardless of their purpose.
As far as shutting down their scan abilities between parcels in a region, you're right, that would mean that the Lindens would need to impose more restrictions on bots than is possible with avatars, which probably won't happen because Reasons.