Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Several months after Bonnie Bots brought enormous Sturm und Drang to the Second Life community, Linden Lab has added tools for landowners to block bots from their property — and posted a warning to collectors of Second Life user data like, well, Bonnie Bots.

The updated tool is "deny_bots", and as that suggests, when the setting for that is switched to On, "all scripted agents that are not explicitly listed in the estate’s Allowed Access list will be denied access to all of the regions within the Estate."

As for the warning, it's available here in Linden Lab's Scripted Agent Policy.

"Read this before considering collecting data in SL for use outside of SL," as Linden Lab Infosec head Soft Linden put it warningly, "or if you are a resident who wants to understand and assert your rights regarding third-party sites and tools."

Tyche Shepherd (pictured), who uses bots to gather data for her much-read Grid Survey land analytics site, has an ambivalent reaction to this change.

"I’m surprised it's taken this long," she tells me. "Scripted agent settings were introduced in 2009. In some ways its a shame but I fully understand why the Lab has introduced the ability to block access, though it may have been more flexible to allow or block at the region level rather than estate. Personally it doesn’t impact my Grid Survey weekly online region surveys, as these don’t require physical visits." However, she adds, it does prevent her from doing sampling surveys she once conducted.

The wording of the Scripted Agent Policy is curious. It represents Linden Lab's "policy" on bots and data collection, but is also somewhat toothless. It states that using bots to artificially boost traffic is against the company's TOS:

You may not attempt to gain an unfair advantage in search results through the use of Scripted Agents to inflate the traffic for a parcel. This policy applies to both mainland and private estates, as Second Life search includes both. Please refer to the Second Life Terms and Conditions, section 5.i.

.. At the same time, using bots to publish user data from within Second Life to the web is not explicitly stated to be against TOS, but more like something that may fall into a Not Cool category — and also may be against actual real life laws:

Data transferred outside of the Second Life service or its supporting websites is not exempt from protection under applicable data privacy laws. This applies whether data is collected by Scripted Agents, LSL scripts, or external tools. Access to the Second Life service and access to Personal Data of Second Life Residents are both conditioned on adherence to all applicable global privacy regulations governing the collection, storage, processing, or transmission of Personal Data.

These laws include Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). We recommend that you seek guidance from a privacy attorney for additional, updated information before using Personal Data of Second Life Residents outside of Second Life. 

Indeed my reading of the policy is basically: "If you don't like bots collecting data from your property, use these tools we gave you. If you really don't like it, call the cops. Also, if you're a SL data collector: Better call Saul."

And as I read that, Linden Lab would only take action against a data collector/reporter found to be in violation of real life laws. 

"I think its more a reminder to the data scrapers that they need to be compliant with the relevant privacy and data handling regulations," Tyche tells me. "Legislation such as GDPR and the CCPA implicitly protect citizens in their own jurisdictions even if the data is collected outside those jurisdictions , now IANAL. But I'm sure the Lab (which of course is covered by the CCPA) got their own counsel to sign off the wording in the policy."

As for Bonnie Bots, the site that pretty much single-handedly started these changes in motion, I asked their PR rep about this, and they only sent back this curious meme-flavored reply:

So seems like Bonnie Bots will keep botting until further notice!