On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof

[Roz]

[Pax]

@Ashen-Shugar My dude, my guy, my french fry:

That data collection exists at an obligatory and, let’s be fair, extremely technical level doesn’t mean that overt monitoring is the ideal resolution in every scenario.

What a nuclear take.

[sao]

@Pax I am going to remember that French fry forever. Ty for expanding my vocabulary in this way.

[Ashen-Shugar]

@Pax said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:

@Ashen-Shugar My dude, my guy, my french fry:

That data collection exists at an obligatory and, let’s be fair, extremely technical level doesn’t mean that overt monitoring is the ideal resolution in every scenario.

What a nuclear take.

@Pax my bud, my chum, my beaten drum:

Obligatory in a ‘need for beer’ kind of way sure, in that ‘if you want to use our services, you agree to be collected’. Where ‘opt-out’ means you don’t use the service, which, for a lot of places means ‘the internet’.

Even ‘opting out’ just means it dosn’t personalize the data, they still collect it.

It’s not a nuclear option when most places are glowing green around us.

[sao]

@Ashen-Shugar this really just is a weird derail of the point. The fact that we live in a weird corporatist oligarchy is a fact that we all live with but that doesn’t mean that in our hobbies as between each other we can’t have totally reasonable expectations of privacy and data sharing separate from the compromises we have had to make with technology in order to exist.

Google may be up in my business but that doesn’t mean my friends expect me to hand them my password just because we chat. Like, what even is this point you’re trying to make?

[Ashen-Shugar]

@sao said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:

@Ashen-Shugar this really just is a weird derail of the point. The fact that we live in a weird corporatist oligarchy is a fact that we all live with but that doesn’t mean that in our hobbies as between each other we can’t have totally reasonable expectations of privacy and data sharing separate from the compromises we have had to make with technology in order to exist.

Google may be up in my business but that doesn’t mean my friends expect me to hand them my password just because we chat. Like, what even is this point you’re trying to make?

The point I’m tryng to make is that whle privacy should be enjoyed and even apprecated, it really shouldn’t be expected, especally when situatons arise that may demand that privacy concerns are not as important as the situation that may require that data.

That’s my point.

[shit-piss-love]

@Ashen-Shugar There’s an Atlantic-sized gulf between “TCP capture is possible” and “this game server I am playing on has developed a specifically coded feature that enables me to view log data at will”. Like no I’m not concerned someone’s gonna wireshark my TS or whatever but I am concerned that someone’s got a tool running that pipes all synonyms for pee-pee and hoo-ha to their terminal.

[sao]

Expectation of privacy is actually a legal concept that has protections in most of the world, including the US and the EU, which is why all those EULAs have indemnification waivers in them. Privacy should absolutely expected because its violation is not and should not be the standard.

It’s not a privilege, it’s a right. (Unlike playing on a game – clearly a privilege, not a right.)

Am I an absolutist on this? Clearly not. I am on the internet. But the idea that I should be thanking staffers for not sticking their noses in my underwear because they are entitled to do so in some way is frankly ludicrous.

[Testament]

Is it weird that, as a Ares game runner, I have literally no idea how to access that information and I have the server password to my game? I just kind of shrug assume if something is wrong, the server owners will let me know.

…or they’ll remind that my card is expired because I changed debit cards and forgot to switch it there too.

[Tat]

@Testament said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:

Is it weird that, as a Ares game runner, I have literally no idea how to access that information and I have the server password to my game? I just kind of shrug assume if something is wrong, the server owners will let me know.

…or they’ll remind that my card is expired because I changed debit cards and forgot to switch it there too.

No, it’s designed this way on purpose. Someone who knows how to use code to access the database has access to lots of information, but I’d wager that most Ares gamerunners do not fall under this umbrella.

[Pax]

@Ashen-Shugar Your point is flawed.

Of course data is being collected; that’s hardly secret; data is being collected to such an extent that it’s monetized to pay for some of the largest companies in the world. Meta and Google are running almost entirely on your privacy.

But what it sounds like you’re saying is that because this data is being collected and we’re all here on the web in apparent tacit acceptance of that social contract, that no one has any ground to stand on in taking issue with how the data collected is accessed or used.

The tldr of your weird hill is: “You don’t like logs? TOO BAD. THE INTERNET, BABY.”

You’re not creating conversation, you’re, as someone rightly said, derailing it with unnecessary pedantry. Stahp.

[dvoraen]

@Ashen-Shugar So let’s see if I can explain why I disagree with a metaphor. This is how your point comes across, to me:

I own a building. A crime happens in my building. I’m culpable for the crime because I own the building.

So I suddenly am expected to a) track what goes on in the building; b) had any control whatsoever about what happens inside the building.

That’s ridiculous, and most certainly not how it works in today’s society, otherwise companies and schools would be liable for the mass shootings that happen inside their areas. It’s an absolutely absurd take.

I reject the idea that I need to tacitly monitor everything that happens on a MU* I run because someone might do something illegal. That’s like saying I should wiretap my neighbors because they talked about where to hide a corpse, because I live in the same apartment complex. Oh no, they did something bad, clearly I need to have been more responsible to make sure it didn’t happen so I could tell the cops, to the point of being unethical and invasive in my methods!

No.

[Polk]

@shit-piss-love Sponge basically wiresharked all traffic in and out of City of Hope. I don’t know if that functionality was preserved after the game was moved.

That sounds HORRIBLE, and will make players feel bad, but in practice that sort of thing is completely, absolutely impractical for a person to read unless there’s some urgent need involved.

The more you’re logging, the more impersonal it is.

The worst spying is the personal kind: sitting DARK and following you is far more of an intrusion.

Which is why I said the players would FEEL bad about mass logging: it’s much less of an intrusion than it sounds like.

[Pavel]

If you’ve got it written in a public, easily accessible and understood form, that you’re logging everything all the time always? That’s fine, go for gold.

If you do it surreptitiously, that’s where the violation is. It’s not the action itself, it’s the lack of transparency that loses the trust. And without trust it doesn’t matter how much data you have logged, nobody’s going to believe you.

[Ashen-Shugar]

@Pavel said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:

If you’ve got it written in a public, easily accessible and understood form, that you’re logging everything all the time always? That’s fine, go for gold.

If you do it surreptitiously, that’s where the violation is. It’s not the action itself, it’s the lack of transparency that loses the trust. And without trust it doesn’t matter how much data you have logged, nobody’s going to believe you.

This I will grant you, 100%.

If you log, you need to be upfront that you are doing it. Doing it on the sly helps no one.

If privacy is not guarenteed on the game and that you may log when situations warrent it, you need to be visible about it.

We were on Labyrinth from the start, and to be frank it’s the only thing that stopped my wife and I being considered as accessories from what amounted to statuary rape charges that the abuser was doing on our mush.

It’s an extreme case, but here’s the thing I learned

I would rather invade privacy one million times I would rather annoy and piss off every single person on here. If it would save the innocence of one. single. child.

I hope none of you are ever put into a situation like that. It scars you. For life.

It twists your perceptions of what is truly important. It twists your morals on what you think you knew and what s reality.

It corrupts your beliefs on what is truly evil in the world.

I wish and hope and pray none of you ever go through that.

But it’s partly why I stand so hard nosed on why logs are necessary.

It’s not always about privacy. Sometimes it’s necessary to protect people who don’t even know they need protecting.

Where the line is? That’s up to you to discover.

[Polk]

@Ashen-Shugar See, you’re talking from a presumption of good faith.

Half the people here, are thinking about the worst bad actors.

But the problem with the bad actors is they’re bad actors. Not the tools they use.

System administrators have many tools. They are morally neutral.

[Pavel]

@Polk said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:

Half the people here, are thinking about the worst bad actors.

I’d say that people here think badly about the casual use of a pretty invasive tool, without prior warning, rather than necessarily focusing on ill intent. Not bad actors, just stupid nosy actors.

[Gashlycrumb]

@MisterBoring said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:

This makes me feel like all players view all staff as bad actors by default.

By the same reasoning, wanting to log everything would imply that staff view all players as bad actors by default.

I did not believe that the members of the SAR team who used my yard for training would steal things or trash my house, but I still made them make their own toilet arrangements for when I wasn’t home, rather than let them all have keys.

Also, my experience leads me to be deeply suspicious of anyone who says, “I would never use this thing for ill, but I must have unlimited access to it so that it’d be really easy to do so.”

And what sao says. MU staff will not concretely harm me if they’re reading my private pages about my venereal warts, but I still don’t want them to.

[bear_necessities]

I’m moving this to here so I don’t completely derail the Witcher game conversation but this whole idea of privacy and logging player behavior is sticking in my craw. I couldn’t define why until @Roz said:

@Roz said in Witcher MUSH Design:

I’m half-stealing someone else’s thought here that was brewing in my mind, but. What your responses have made me worry about is the sense that you think you can kind of – code fixes to player disputes, and you just can’t. And you may be building yourself a false sense of security by adding these tools that aren’t at all going to catch the sort of harassment that goes on. Like, if you build tools that don’t solve a problem, but you feel like they’re solving some of the problem, then I think you’re actually less likely to actually catch and fix things.

I think that’s it - that the idea we can log and “catch” bad actors by flagging problematic words or something is the illusion of safety. I think it’s so important for game runners to instead create an environment where complaints are taken seriously, no matter who is involved or the genders of the characters/players. I’ll never forget the time I finally complained about a player - who, for months, would ‘accidentally’ show up in my room, or page me randomly asking me who I was RPing with and then talk shit about that person, and tried to use my lack of knowledge about the game mechanics to try and get me to have a relationship with her character - and was told that she was “kinda frisky but harmless.” It didn’t make me feel safe, and I never felt comfortable complaining again, and no amount of log reading or word flagging would’ve ever popped her as the creeper that she was. Turns out I wasn’t the only person she did this to. She never got banned.

Anyway the point is, there’s no sure-fire way to catch a creeper and it’s really most important for gamerunners to show themselves to be “safe”. Once you have that, people WILL come to you about stuff, and you WILL catch the creepers, but it takes time to establish that.

[Istus]

@bear_necessities The tricky part is establishing that trust. Until that trust exists, and a community is comfortable enough bringing stuff up, there needs to be a mechanism to increase the chance of an issue surfacing ‘on its own.’