Re: Monitoring on MOOs and wizards' roles

• Date: Thu, 28 Sep 1995 08:22:57 PDT
• From:
  andreas.dieberger@lcc.gatech.edu (Andreas Dieberger)
• Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

>>   I'd like to address the issue of wizards using their power to monitor
>> people through the use of #0:do_command and other such devices.  Is this
>> morally wrong?  I'd like to hear what people think about the use of
>> things like this that are in use at places such as CaxyMOO and HT (last
>> time I checked).
>>   Comments, anyone?

I use logging in techMOO, which is not an open system right now. I normally
have a short talk with everybody before giving them a character and there I
tell them that I - for example - count how often they use various commands
and that there is a log that stores how they move to the MOO. There is NO
logging of personal information however which makes this type of logging
not really an invasion of privacy. I installed the logging functions not on
#0:do_command as I log only a few selected things (navigation). The logging
functions can be disabled by setting a flag on the player to 0 so if
somebody strongly resists being logged I can disable logging for that
person.

In Austria - where I originally come from - logging of all person related
data is legal only when you have the ok from the person logged (actually
there are evenmore rules I dont want to go into here). It is similar with
many other countries. I think that as MOOs are accessible not only to
people from one country we have to be very careful when logging and I
generally think people should know that logging is active and what you log.
If you explain what you use it for they normally dont mind anyway so there
seldom is a real reason to hide logging from them.

Well- in my case - when I will make TechMOO an open system ( I plan to do
that in a month or so) then I will either disable logging (quite unlikely)
or rather provide a warning message in the login message. AND I will tell
people that if they object to being logged they shall send me mail and I
will toggle the logging switch for their player character.

Andreas


-----------------------------------------------------------
                     Andreas Dieberger
             Georgia Institute of Technology
     School of Literature, Communication and Culture
                Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0165
        Tel: (404) 894-8009   Fax: (404) 853-0373

andreas.dieberger@lcc.gatech.edu    dieberger.chi@xerox.com
 http://www.gatech.edu/lcc/idt/Faculty/andreas_dieberger/
                CU-SeeME: 130.207.147.214
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             The last good thing written in C
            was Franz Schubert's Ninth Symphony

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