Why Bonnie Bots Attract Backlash Across Second Life, While Grid Survey Bots Do Not: Tyche's Take

Pictured: Tyche with one of her data-collecting bots

As we watch the controversy over Bonnie Bots roil in angry comments across the Second Life media ecosystem, I've been curious about a mysterious discrepancy:

Grid Survey has been using bots to collect and display Second Life sim and user data for well over 10 years. Run by Tyche Shepherd, it's attracted very little controversy among the community; indeed, many SLers eagerly await her regularly summation of the latest data on community forums.

Why so much appreciation for Grid Survey, and so much outrage over Bonnie Bots?

"I think its a matter of perceptions," Tyche tells me. "From very early on when I started the project, I realized there was a lot more data I could collect including avatar information, but I really didn't want to collect things which were not required for the main task, which in my case, was measuring and monitoring the size of the grid."

Another reason might be that the Bonnie Bots don't look like "bots", and from a distance, look like a standard fashionista avatar. That's led some to fear that Bonnie is an alt "spying" on them.

"Ah an Uncanny Valley hypothesis," Tyche says, when I suggest this idea. "It's probably more the frequency of visiting -- I'm sure a lot of observations are just records in Visitor Lists."

That's another big difference -- Bonnie Bot visits are seriously incessant, compared to Tyche's bots:

 

"Most of my surveys don't require teleporting around the grid -- only the Mainland Census and the private estate random surveying, both of which I no longer run.

"But even when I was running those, it was a single visit to each mainland region once or twice a year and a sample of ~2000 regions once a month at the peak. So in practice my bots (and it was probably only 2 to 3 running at a time at most) only made infrequent visits.

"If I understand it, Bonnie Bots try to visits all regions every 24 hours. I'm sure they are therefore more visible than mine ever were. I can understand why they feel they need to sample at such a high rate to give good coverage, but as a statistician I would suggest that a well-designed sampling frame could be developed which would significantly reduce the number and frequency visits they actually need to make."

Also, Tyche does get complaints from time to time, from sim owners "angry or upset about intrusions by my bots. But I always treated them politely and put the region on a No Survey list. I still see some of these people defending my bots on [forums] discussions purely because of how their complaint was handled by me."

Tyche does have some advice for the Bonnie Bots team:

"[T]hink about what the core service is they want to provide and stick to that -- some of the more controversial things they have done such as the Avatar Search really doesn't offer any value to users over and above what's in My.Second Life.com. So why bother? It just attracts controversy.

"Maybe think about either anonymizing users or just reporting summary data rather than specific Merchant sales would go some why to cooling things down.

"As I said earlier, just because something can be done doesn't mean it should be."

To all that, I would add this: Tyche is a friendly and active member of some popular Second Life community forums, which also contributes greatly to the difference in reaction. Like a real world community, SLers are likely to react much better when a well-known and trusted member starts collecting data on them, as opposed to some mysterious stranger shows up and starts doing that.

If the Bonnie Bots team keeps engaging with and being responsive to the community, chances are they could become as welcome as Grid Survey.

Comments

[0xc0ffea]

If Bonnie stuck to land and didn't seem to take great joy in collecting every single bit of data about the people on the land, this would all have gone down very differently.

Tyche has been providing grid statistics for years and never once decided to breach everyone's privacy just because she could or there was an LSL function that allowed it. Never once decided that everyone _really_ needed to know just how popular a bodily fluids system was.

Tyche is demonstrably trusted, picked a specific broadly useful dataset (how big is Second Life) and diligently stuck to it, for years.

Does anyone trust bonnie & co not to publish a list of commonly visited locations next to every avatar? Or typical online times? Or username & display name changes? Or literally anything else they can scrape up and think they can get away with?

So long as there is one person left in SL yet to find out their profile (and now, avatar online status) is being scraped and dumped on a website, I very much doubt it.

[The concerned resident]

The thing is that residents are starting to trip over bots. Everybody and their mother are running bot networks these days for every reason they see fit.

Some are good bots, other are spy bots, others farm data for unknown reasons.

Bot owners need to ask for consent, they cannot grab data just because it is available to grab or is public data.

There also seems to be a misconception of what exactly is Personal Data at Linden Lab as it goes much further than a RL name, address, email or IP address.

When you touch a vendor in Second Life and that is tracked that is personal data. Your Inventory in world is personal data, your teleport history is personal data. Your whereabouts in the metaverse or virtual world is personal data.

If you are wearing attachments that is personal data and should not be scanned or put on a website without consent.

At Linden Lab their are scratching their head now over this issue. I am sure they'll be having a lot of meetings.

I found out there are bots in world teleporting around to measure the height of your avatar. Imagine you find a bot in your house bothering you because some little data scraper finds it interesting to know the height of your avatar and make a statistic about this.

What about dark bots, used for marketing purposes, used to listen in on voice chat conversations, record these and then transcribe these for all kinds of purposes or to target certain vulnerable individuals?

A hard no against any type of bot that is being used to farm data. The grid survey bot is useful because Linden Lab no longer wanted to publish their region stats.

Linden Lab should produce economic statistics again like before. Useful information about the in world economy and data that respects the privacy of residents.

Also the grid survey bot doesn't need to teleport around anymore for its stats.

[chesse]

its just bots collecting info thats basically public . i think its really cool to know what attachments and bodies are popular since those stats are so hard to find otherwise

[Luther Weymann]

I'm a cartoon character in a server-based wireframe application connected to a database. Everything about me in this software program is a fantasy except for my money and human emotions. No bot collecting data can touch my money or feel my human emotions. So, your bots, you data collectors, you can have anything else that you can harvest. Because it is not my data, it is my cartoon characters’ data which is worthless and meaningless.

[redacted]

Luther Weymann, that's very shortsighted. User activity and what they do inworld (where, when, what, with who) is definitively user-data.

Lots of polarized comments under these articles, pitchfork or it's all fine, only a few tried to look at the whole picture to get a less biased view (like Tyche). Welcome to the Internet.

[Luther Weymann]

Now I know I'm shortsighted and not allowed to have an opinion that does not suit Redacted. Where would my life be without Redacted telling me off and welcoming me to the internet after nearly 40 years of using it?

[gorilla tag]

My lack of long-term thinking has made it clear that I am not welcome to express any views that do not align with Redacted's. What would I do if, after over 40 years of using the internet, Redacted scolded me and welcomed me?