On the Matter of Player Privacy

Recently there was some Discord discussion surrounding the topic of the existence of private items and what it means to the server - to players and to staff. (You may find the Discord thread in #freedom-01-server-chat "Discussion regarding proprietary items".) While I do feel confident about a satisfactory conclusion being reached specifically on the topic of private items itself, I am creating this thread to push forward the discussion of player privacy in general, what it means, and how we enforce rules regarding such or otherwise uphold and respect it.

For what we're currently doing, we may refer to the community guidelines:

Quote from wild1145

1) Respect & remain mindful of other members of the community.

TF at it's core is it's community, we want everyone to feel like TF is a welcoming and we expect anyone within our platforms to respect other members of the community and remember that everyone is unique, and everyone will have different backgrounds, experiences and perspectives. Discrimination, Attacks, Scams, Bullying or any other form of abuse of any kind towards other members of the communities will not be tolerated and will be subject to staff intervention.

To get the obvious out of the way, I personally believe that the act of upholding privacy by punishing offending players is to remove those that disrespects other members of the community, which we obviously value. It should be noted that the final goal is to make players feel respected, and in this specific topic, feels safe with their privacy - And this is how it ties in with the mentioned community guideline.

While this is a good summary, I think we can do a little bit of reflection on:

1. What we define as a player's privacy
   • How we define it in spirit - What does something being "private" really mean in its purest conceptual form
   • How we define it in action - What constitutes as a player's "privacy"
   • How that interacts with the world - What violates it, and what may respect it
2. What players should reasonably expect from administrating staff members (and by extension, the limit of our abilities)
   • What we are able to - To prevent violations, to punish offenses, and to respect boundaries set by players
   • What we are not able to - Unrealistic expectations and what our limits are to "respecting privacy"
3. What we are already doing to respect such
   
   • Specific cases where we can expect administrative control to offending players
   • Prevention of actions one can take that may violate privacy
4. How we may improve upon what we already do

I hope that with this discussion we may elucidate a few myths flying around, form a stronger consensus and hopefully improve privacy on TF.

Quote from CoolestGuy94

Privacy Policy for a minecraft server... Pretty cool.

I don't think anyone is seriously mentioning instating an entire policy dedicated to privacy? Either way, this thread only serves to provide a place of discussion of matters regarding privacy. Whether or not a policy is needed will be up to the general community.

If you do have differing opinions on whether or not such privacy should even exist in the first place on our community, I welcome you to raise your argument.

Quote from Alco_Rs11

You really shouldn't expect privacy regarding items, etc. on a place like TF and it's next to impossible to stop people from using item loggers which quietly log items for retrieving later. If you don't want your shit potentially stolen, keep it in your toolbars and don't bring it to TF.

I agree with this statement, but only to a degree.

I understand that tracking specific items is essentially impossible - if not downright impossible. As long as the items exist(ed) on the server, there will probably be a way to acquire them without explicit permission from their owners. This is a point that I am willing to acknowledge, and where players can have reasonable expectations and responsibilities about their own items.

However, in extreme cases where some form of item piracy is obviously happening (exactly same NBT with original credits still attached, with the original owner specifying that the item is not to be distributed, yet it is distributed anyway), if admins were to see that, is it not fair for the offended player (the one that made the private items) to expect some form of punishment towards someone who clearly violated someone else's privacy?

In turn, while players can be punished for obvious cases of intruding on another's private builds, you can still "spy" the same if you were to use, say, a completely clientsided alternative (e.g. free-cam), or go into another player's private territory with some alt account, or some other way that is not inherently obvious at first sight. Should we, then, because of this fact, completely give up sanctioning players of intrusion?

The idea is, while there are acts of invasions of privacy where it is unreasonable to expect them to be regulated, I think there are other acts of invasion of privacy, on the other end of the spectrum, that we can do something about.

These are all similar points that I have raised in the Discord discussion thread.

Quote from Gommeh

As admins, I think we have an obligation to uphold that as best as we can, unless it interferes with our ability to administrate and enforce the rules.

This should fall in reasonable expectations of a player that expects both privacy and safety via admin monitoring players.

On one end, players having complete privacy where admins cannot see what people are doing leads to significant security and stability risks for other members and the server in general - on the other end, admins having complete control over every player's every activity with item creation or building sounds like literally 1984. With many things in life, the dose is the poison and a balance is the antidote - I personally believe that it is reasonable to administrate given a valid suspicion (lag machine built on private grounds, potentially exploitative item being used), but to respect privacy in other cases.

The bottom line is, having an environment where players can feel safe and respected should be a goal for every member in the community, be they the normal players trying to build a community with others, or staff members with enforcing rules that upholds such. Having privacy is one of the bigger points that we have regarding this, yet it is strange that I believe that we have rarely explored and developed the idea much, and mostly left this as an excercise to admins to have a feel for themselves. This post is here for a place of discussion before another fight breaks out in server chat due to "i should not have been banned with this" or "why isnt anyone doing anything to this obviously annoying guy". Afterall, as much as it is important to have a good standard between admins, the more important fact is to communicate this standard to other members and make aware of each other's expectations towards one another.