Track a Member

[Wolfie]

Actually, in this case you would be. Facebook's terms of service require that you have permission to post anything to FB. Likewise, FaceBook engineers and others can see and distribute the photos that "you own". By posting them to the internet, even privately, you have redistributed them.

Maybe I misunderstood what Tanax was meaning, but my impression was of his saving pictures to his computer of a girl on FB that he thinks is cute.

I could have misread it though, so I'll have to wait to see what he says to clear it up.

[Tanax]

Where did I say that admins are not allowed to do so?

Nowhere. It just seems as if you're against the idea just because admins "shouldn't" do so.

So if you stumble upon a site that posts up child porn and you save it to your computer for your eyes only, then you're not breaking the law? Nice. I doubt you do that, but you can see how that logic is flawed already.

The logic isn't flawed. If you read about copyright you'll see that someone who owns a picture, puts it up on the net, anyone can download it without breaking the law. When it comes to childporn, then use your brain. Obviously it's not legal to even put up childporn on the net, let alone download it(it is however strangely enough allowed to view it :s). But the rules on childporn is very weird. For instance, you can take a picture on your child when they are bathing naked. You can even put it up on the net. All legal. Someone can download it, legal aswell since you have the copyright, you are allowed to put it up, hence they can download it privately. However! If they use the picture for - well you know what - the picture is magically considered as childporn, out of the blue.

I never said that tracking a members content is a crime in and of itself. I said that it has the potential to be abused and used for stalking. Having potential for something doesn't mean that it's a fact.

New member signs up, has a suspicious looking name (say Nike Fanboy, which is a name I just made up in my head so any resemblance to a real member with that name is purely coincidental). Admin decides to track them. They make several posts and within those posts, it becomes clear that they're just a huge fan of Nike shoes and nothing more. Admin stops tracking, all is well. No crime has been committed.

Now, say a long time member has finally posted a few pictures of herself and the admin thinks, "OMG she's hot, I gotta have her!" and starts tracking her so that he (or she) can follow her around like a loyal puppy. Every time she makes a post, s/he is right there on it, reading it ASAP. Okay so far, that sounds innocent enough, but let's say that she's also got a blog and has made several entries private but happens to notice that the admin seems to do exactly what she does, and that the admin lingers in the blogs after she's made a new private entry. Suddenly, that's crossed over from just tracking someone to make sure they don't do something bad into the territory of stalking.

It's not the feature, it's how it's used. If you don't believe it's possible for innocent features to be misused for committing crimes, they you are living in a dream world.

Again, I say, my sole purpose of mentioning it to begin with is to raise awareness to the potential abuse. Should that be a reason to NOT develop the feature? No, of course not. If an admin is determine to 'stalk' someone, they're going to do it. This would only make it easier. Something to keep in mind if you're running a board, one of your admin comments how one of the members is cute and then suddenly they seem to know that members every move. They might be using that feature for just that reason.

Everything on this board can be abused. Oh my god, I used my email address to sign up because the admin required it to be email validated! The admin can put me in adlists, oh my god. The admin can do so much more. IP's are stored on the board, isn't that actually WORSE than tracking the content seeing as tracking IP is actually more realistic and revealing than the content itself?

I'm not saying it can't be abused, I'm just saying that everything on the net can be abused. Should we remove IP logs then? No, of course not. We need them to be able to ban troublesome member IP's and crossreference different members if we only allow 1 account per person. Just like we would need a way to track members, to be able to track troublesome members and react more quickly to rulebreaking/lawbreaking.

Actually, in this case you would be. Facebook's terms of service require that you have permission to post anything to FB. Likewise, FaceBook engineers and others can see and distribute the photos that "you own". By posting them to the internet, even privately, you have redistributed them.

Not really. Sure enough, they own it, but I can still download them privately, legally.

[Tanax]

Maybe I misunderstood what Tanax was meaning, but my impression was of his saving pictures to his computer of a girl on FB that he thinks is cute.

I could have misread it though, so I'll have to wait to see what he says to clear it up.

You are correct :)
To make it even clearer; I find a cute girl(or guy :P) on FB, I can legally download her/his pictures and save them on my computer for private use.

[Wolf]

You are correct :)

To make it even clearer; I find a cute girl(or guy :P) on FB, I can legally download her/his pictures and save them on my computer for private use.

Yes, but we aren't talking about simply viewing the posts. A really obsessed stalker-53-year-old-admin-living-with-his-mom would make it a point to reply to the posts from his victim, PM and email them a couple of times, and so on. I love the idea, but it can be abused. ;P

[Wolfie]

Nowhere. It just seems as if you're against the idea just because admins "shouldn't" do so.

I've actually said that if it makes it significantly easier to track someone (who may try to cause problems), then I'm for it. Again, only brought up the stalking point of view to bring up awareness, nothing more.

The logic isn't flawed. If you read about copyright you'll see that someone who owns a picture, puts it up on the net, anyone can download it without breaking the law. When it comes to childporn, then use your brain. Obviously it's not legal to even put up childporn on the net, let alone download it(it is however strangely enough allowed to view it :s).

To view it, you must download it. How else will the image display on your screen?

Everything on this board can be abused. Oh my god, I used my email address to sign up because the admin required it to be email validated! The admin can put me in adlists, oh my god. The admin can do so much more. IP's are stored on the board, isn't that actually WORSE than tracking the content seeing as tracking IP is actually more realistic and revealing than the content itself?

I've said that other options could easily be used to stalk people and such. Not saying those features need to be done away with. But did bring it up to point out that just about any feature can be misused.

[Wolfie]

I love the idea, but it can be abused. ;P

The whole point exactly. CAN BE abused. Like many other features can be. Just so long as their is awareness of the potential abuse, then that's what I care about. I said early on that I'm in favor of tools that help an admin to keep control of their board, and I still am. :)

[Tanax]

Yes, but we aren't talking about simply viewing the posts. A really obsessed stalker-53-year-old-admin-living-with-his-mom would make it a point to reply to the posts from his victim, PM and email them a couple of times, and so on. I love the idea, but it can be abused. ;P

And that can't be done via IP tracking services when the admin got the member's IP? And the email, well.. that can be abused to. In fact, the whole board could probably be abused if put in an abuser's hands. Sure we should be aware, but it would be stupid to deny this idea just because it CAN be abused.

I've actually said that if it makes it significantly easier to track someone (who may try to cause problems), then I'm for it. Again, only brought up the stalking point of view to bring up awareness, nothing more.

Alright, fair enough. Like I said above though, if the idea got denied because it could be abused it would be very stupid since most of the things an admin can do with the members can be abused in one way or another.

To view it, you must download it. How else will the image display on your screen?

You are correct, but incorrect. The downloading of images from the net when you're just viewing a page(or even an image) are stored in a cache memory. It is not illegal to have childporn stored in the cache because it's so small so it will be erased very quickly. However if you save the image(either from when you're viewing it or later using the cache to "restore" the image) it is illegal. I think it's sick, and the laws are so weird about this, but ahwell. This is a strange discussion. I guess I have to suit myself seeing as I was the one bringing it up :P

[Wolfie]

You are correct, but incorrect. The downloading of images from the net when you're just viewing a page(or even an image) are stored in a cache memory. It is not illegal to have childporn stored in the cache because it's so small so it will be erased very quickly. However if you save the image(either from when you're viewing it or later using the cache to "restore" the image) it is illegal. I think it's sick, and the laws are so weird about this, but ahwell. This is a strange discussion. I guess I have to suit myself seeing as I was the one bringing it up :P

Then what about when people have been caught surfing the internet for child porn because of their browser history and the images that resulted from it (not ones that they saved for later use)? If it's downloaded into the cache, then it's still downloaded and as a result can be viewed outside of the web browser. I'm sure that if you happened to be walking by someone and saw child porn up on their screen, then you wouldn't go to jail for looking at that, because how do you know what it is before you look at it? But to actively hunt for it is a rather different story.

[Tanax]

Then what about when people have been caught surfing the internet for child porn because of their browser history and the images that resulted from it (not ones that they saved for later use)? If it's downloaded into the cache, then it's still downloaded and as a result can be viewed outside of the web browser. I'm sure that if you happened to be walking by someone and saw child porn up on their screen, then you wouldn't go to jail for looking at that, because how do you know what it is before you look at it? But to actively hunt for it is a rather different story.

I'm quite interested in law, specifically laws concerning internet, but the laws regarding childporn are very vague so I'm not sure.
Regarding the cache you can't VIEW the cache. The cache is there for the computer and is nothing that you can access "just like that". There are however programs that can access the cache and pull data from it but you would require special tools for that - that's the illegal part, pulling a childporn image from the cache and store it on your computer is illegal(pulling other data on the other hand is legal as long as the data itself is legal, the cache is after all yours). But say you're viewing childporn on your computer 24/7 but never download a single image, you would not be doing anything illegal(YET! I think they are about to change the laws regarding that because they clearly see the flaws in the system aswell). The problem is as you say, what if someone surfs the web and an adpopup appears with childporn, you would have childporn in your cache and if they implement the new laws that viewing childporn is illegal too, then you would be breaking the law without even doing anything - so there's flaws in whatever law they will implement.

[Wolfie]

When using IE, I can open up the Internet Options, click to view the files and browse them just like that.

With FF, there's an extension that makes it easy to browse the cache as well. Nothing hard about it and it's not a program, simply an extra option added to FF.

[Tanax]

When using IE, I can open up the Internet Options, click to view the files and browse them just like that.

With FF, there's an extension that makes it easy to browse the cache as well. Nothing hard about it and it's not a program, simply an extra option added to FF.

Hmm, alright. Then it have changed since I checked out how cache works. My point still stands though. You can view the images in your cache as long as you don't save them on your computer outside the cache.

[Wolfie]

Hmm, alright. Then it have changed since I checked out how cache works. My point still stands though. You can view the images in your cache as long as you don't save them on your computer outside the cache.

Tell you what. You go demonstrate how it's legal to view them with your browser (provided you don't save them to your computer for keeping permanently) and I'll just not worry about it because I won't view that material to begin with. Be sure to write from prison. :thumbsup:

(Okay seriously don't do that, would hate to lose a fellow IPS customer like that.)

[Tanax]

Tell you what. You go demonstrate how it's legal to view them with your browser (provided you don't save them to your computer for keeping permanently) and I'll just not worry about it because I won't view that material to begin with. Be sure to write from prison. :thumbsup:

(Okay seriously don't do that, would hate to lose a fellow IPS customer like that.)

Ew. No thanks! (I know it was a joke, but childporn is pretty serious).
Anyhow, this wasn't really about THAT anyway, it was just to prove a point that I can download an image(as long as the image itself is legal and that the one who uploaded it was the author/owner of copyright) and that it would be perfectly legal. Thus "following" someone on the net is not illegal. Stalking someone on the net however, is another thing.

Otherwise I guess the whole twitter concept is stalking :lol: They even use the word "follow" and "followers".

[Wolfie]

Otherwise I guess the whole twitter concept is stalking :lol: They even use the word [s]"follow"[/s] "stalk" and [s]"followers"[/s] "stalkers".

:whistle:

[Tanax]

:whistle:

Haha, exactly my point :D

[TCWT]

In the end, if it's included and an admin abuses the feature to stalk someone, then that person would risk losing their entire member base over it as well as potential legal issues. It wouldn't be my problem, it would be between that admin, the stalked victim and a court system to work out. :)

This comment is absurd. How is it stalking when all the member's posts are public? There is no such legal issue here.

PS I didn't read the posts on page 2.

[Wolfie]

This comment is absurd. How is it stalking when all the member's posts are public? There is no such legal issue here.

PS I didn't read the posts on page 2.

Go through and read them, your absurd comment is already addressed.

[Eduardo Bautista]

I would prefer this feature to be called "Stalk a Member" and I will definitely use it haha.

[Wolfie]

I would prefer this feature to be called "Stalk a Member" and I will definitely use it haha.

for you, since I know you were saying that to be funny. :lol:

[Tanax]

Bump. This is still needed and I realize it can be abused by the Admin but many things on the board can be abused by the Admin.

[alistairgd]

Bfarber said in the first reply that he thought it was a good idea and hasn't posted to the contrary since, so I'm holding out for it in an update soon :)

[Adriano Faria]

I like it... IPS or anyone other modder has plan for it ?

[alistairgd]

Not to keep banging the drum here, but today was another example of when this feature would have been handy.

I had a member who was generally okay but on one certain topic he continually over stepped the mark. He was told that so long as he stayed off subject X, who could keep his posting rights.

Post moderation would have been a cumbersome, time consuming task for moderators, and it can lead to disjointed threads when posts sit unnaproved while the conversation rages on. How much simplier it would have been to recieve a daily digest of his posts that could be quickly scanned to make sure he was staying in line.

:)