Several pieces have been floating around in the last week or so on virtual crime. GamePolitics discussed a paper by the Australian government’s Institute of Criminology discussing the nature of criminal activity in virtual worlds. It centers around a basic question: is interpersonal crime committed in a virtual space really crime if there is no real-world corollary?
The question of whether real-world notions of interpersonal harm apply to virtual assault or sexual assault is unresolved. This complicates the question of regulation within virtual worlds.
There is some precedent for virtual crime that also occurs in the real world to be considered criminal activity. For example, if you were to illegally extort another person out of Linden Dollars in Second Life, you could be prosecuted for that crime in the real world because Linden Dollars have a real-world monetary equivalent (currently, roughly L$260 = US$1).
But criminal activity that occurs only in a virtual space is a gray area. Consider the cases described by Inside Higher Ed of “avatar rape.” I put that in quotes because there is some disagreement on what specific term should be used. You see, it’s possible for one avatar in Second Life to sexually assault another avatar. Because consent is required to participate realistically in any activity in Second Life, the mechanics of this activity are kind of odd:
- Example 1: An avatar might equip a male genitalia add-on and then walk into another person. There is no forceful penetration, and in many cases, the victim avatar doesn’t necessarily experience anything physical – it is more of a symbolic attack. It can be remedied by either walking away or teleporting elsewhere.
- Example 2: In Second Life, there are objects called “pose balls.” When an avatar right-clicks and selects “Sit” on a pose ball, it loads an animation for that avatar. Sex in Second Life occurs when two avatars are sitting on two pose balls, the animations of which are synced together to simulate some sort of sexual activity. One way that virtual rape can thus occur is by tricking another (usually new) user into sitting on a pose ball that engages them in an unexpected sexual activity. It’s easy to stop such an activity – simply click “Stand Up.”
The commenters provide some interesting perspectives on this piece:
Calling this rape is sensationalistic, yellow journalism. Exposure to unwanted sexual imagery (which is the closest you might call this) is sexual harassment, at worst. This is certainly a non-trivial issue, but to call it rape is irresponsible. In doing so, you are implying that actual rape victims have similar feelings and reactions to Second Life “rape” victims, and that is frankly insulting. Psychologically, I expect this sort of behavior’s effect is closer to flashing/exhibitionism.
Regardless of the specifics, it is clear that Second Life is to some degree an untamed frontier, where the specific rules of law and order in relation to “the real world” are not clear. Is it ethical to expose students or employees to such an environment?
In my research laboratory, where we are currently testing Second Life-type training interventions, we never allow research participants onto the open Second Life grid. It’s too dangerous for two reasons. First, the Second Life environment is difficult to control unless you have a private island – any random jackass can come by an interrupt your experiment, although this is uncommon. Second, we would be exposing participants to everything in Second Life, and I don’t believe it’s necessarily appropriate/ethical for researchers to make that decision for them. Or at the least, it’s not a risk that I want to take yet.
But the classroom is a different environment. To some degree, isn’t it the responsibility of instructors to expose students to new ideas and ways of thinking?
The training room is a different story, which I think is the impetus for Linden Lab’s behind-the-firewall product, which allows companies to run their own Second Life grid inaccessible to the Internet at large. Exposing your employees to material not controlled by your company is seem by many companies simply as an unnecessary risk. The only problem is that this product appears to be ridiculously expensive.
There’s been a lot of interest in one of the cases I mentioned last week in which it was discovered that school officials were spying on kids and their families in their own homes by surreptitiously activating webcams on school-provided laptops.
There’s a lot of conflicting information on what exactly happened and what will happen regarding this case, so I set out to collect all of it into a single story.
- First of all, the case came to light through the filing of a class-action lawsuit, which you can find in this PDF. The basic charge is straightforward: the school was spying on children without their consent. It came to light when a student was accused of dealing drugs based on images from the webcam feed, but it turns out that he was just eating Mike & Ikes.
- A response to parents from school district sheds a little more light on the specifics of the situation. The remote-webcam-enabling feature of the laptops was implemented as a security measure – if the laptop was reported stolen and was then used, the webcam would assist in recovering it. This is a not-so-uncommon feature of laptop security programs, and from other sources, I’ve deduced that the specific program in question is called LANrev.
- The school has now been barred from speaking with students or parents about the case under court order, which may explain the sudden lack of information coming out of the school district. You might think this a recommendation from the school system’s own lawyers, but it’s actually from the judge – any formal communication must be approved by the prosecution’s lawyers before it can be sent out officially. They are also forbidden from changing anything about any of the laptops currently with the software under similar guidelines.
- The school’s records indicate that webcams have been activated only 42 times in roughly the past year, and only in incidents where it was believed that the laptops were stolen.
- In addition to the civil matter, the FBI has begun an investigation to determine if any violations of federal laws regarding wiretapping and computer-intrusion have taken place.
- Witold Walczak, legal director of the PA ACLU commented, “This is an age where kids explore their sexuality, so there’s a lot of that going on in the room.” Now we can add child pornography to the list of problems associated with this case. Consider the teen that leaves their laptop open on a desk while they are in their bedroom.
- Spying on kids through webcams is apparently not all that uncommon. Scan ahead to 4:37 of this video from PBS to find a school administrator proudly explaining how he watches the desktops and webcams on his students in order to keep them on task when they’re working. Through webcam snooping, they discovered, for example, that many students use their webcam as a mirror – they will turn the webcam on, style their hair/makeup/etc, and then turn it off. In one example, the administrator surprise-instant-messages a student that he’s been spying on to tell her to get back to work. What’s especially troubling about this video is the total lack of regard for the privacy of the kids – this is treated as an innovative approach to policing child behavior.
Here is the main problem: The school claims they only activate webcams when the laptops are stolen, but the central kid’s laptop was never reported stolen. Thus, either some violation of the school’s own monitoring policies took place, or such policies were never really in place to begin with. Additionally, the school has not come out with a flat-out denial of wrongdoing, only saying that the program had a purpose and was not abused, while simultaneously shutting that program down.
My suspicion is that while official school policy was against spying, the temptation for school officials wanting to sniff out illicit activity was simply too great.
Thanks to Jeremy Anglim’s Blog, I have discovered a section of the UK’s The Guardian that I did not know existed: DataBlog.
It’s practically the scientist’s news wet dream. DataBlog collects raw data, analyzes it, and gives summary information and an interpretation. Already, it is miles ahead of most news outlets, many of which simply collect an interview or two and spin a story for there.
But DataBlog takes it a step further – they provide a copy of the raw data tables that they used to create their story. Amazing, right? As a reader, you can then take it upon yourself to reanalyze the data and come to your own conclusions, whatever the outcome might be. You could contradict them or support them; both are encouraged. If you think they faked their data, it’s right there for you to verify. It reminds me of the editorial standards in Science.
If there’s a picture of more responsible journalism, I’ve never seen it. Now the only question that remains – where’s the American equivalent?