Resident-run age "verification"

http://www.agelock.net/

Networked "verification" service: someone places it on their land, when you tp you're informed you will be seeing adult content. If you agree you're asked for your RL birthdate (if not, you get tp'ed home), if the entered birthdate is 18+ you're fine (if not, you get tp'ed home from there and any other location that use the system).

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Personally, if anyone is going to sollicit RL info on me, I'll trust LL over any resident-run shared ban list, no matter how well intended the motives may be. The whole effort is entirely futile as well, since in order to register you already gave LL a birthdate and you're already on record for declaring yourself over 18.

A step in the right direction? Or if anyone has to do "verification" it might as be a impersonal corporation who could at least be held accountable in RL for what they do with the information?

Is it just a birthday they ask for? If so it's worthless, you can enter any date. If they ask for more than that, no dice here. Like you said, LL is the only party I would even consider giving info to, and they already have it.

I read the FAQ and see what they're trying to do with this. They're up front about the fact that some people will simply lie to get past it. This is basically an SL equivalent to an entry page at a 2d website that has adult material. Either you click the 'I am 18' button and get in, or you click the 'I am not 18' button and you are redirected elsewhere. In this case they go one step extra and ask your birthdate.

They are upfront about the fact that this has nothing to do with protecting children and everything to do with protecting the parcel owners / content creators. As they put it, they'll have a record that an avatar has agreed to be in an area with potentially adult content and that the avatar has provided a birthdate, and therefore there's no 'innocent victem' defence.

All that aside, I don't see this really working. It's an ok effort I guess but if LL proceed with their own scheme, then LL's is going to trump this one. Even if you have an 'age lock' device on your property, if you have 'restricted' content then LL is going to demand you flag the parcel as restricted, which nullifies the need for the 'agelock' device. I think.

-Atashi

I give them credit for being upfront about it instead of all that Save The Children/Broadly Offensive/Report Your Neighbor crap.

Looks like it's just a birthday if the site is accurate.

Somewhat related concern is the fact that one resident is requiring another resident to hand over RL information just to access their parcel.

If it is just birthday.. that could just be the most useless information they could ask for I think... can't find a single person based on just that o.o And.. also if thats all it asks for, its more than likely people will lie. Often. Just to see if they even can sometimes.... so it is kinda going to far but at the same time, it's not doing anything

LL's ID verification is very much in the pipeline, we were asked questions about it last week at an office hour. They want to get it rolled out asap.

If it's the same as it was in beta, it's only slightly better than the agelock system.

If I sit down and really think about it, I'd almost rather have THIS than the asinine "save teh chilluns" ID verification by LL. LL asks us to say "Yeah I'm over 18" at the very beginning of SL installation; that should be enough. If a parcel owner is worried that he might be held liable for whatever content he has, and he puts down a SECOND ID box, then it's only too obvious that any minor who entered his parcel not only lied to LL, but lied to the parcel owner as well. The minor would be held responsible for, whatever, lying? while both LL and the parcel owner are released from guilt. I like it.

The thing is you had to click a button saying you were over 18 when you signed up to SL, didn't you? What does this do that the sign-up doesn't?

Sorry I just don't get the need for this....

This isn't so bad. Its just treating their land like an adult content website.

They wouldn't need to TP me home - I can and would do that for myself.

And assuming I did put up with this sort of intrusion, I'm certain I'd lie and give them a made up date showing I'm over 18 -- rather than scarcely able to remember ever being 18.

That'd be what i would do and they will most likely, if it were a store or a mall, have lost what ever business that I was there to conduct.

I see this resident-run verification as a kind of thoughtful protest... "THIS is how it should be done, LL." TOS covers LL's ass. This extra layer of protection would sheild any individual who utilized it. IMO, that's where our and LL's responsibility ends. Any further burden of nannying falls on the shoulders of a net-faring child's guardian.

Although ultimately it will more than likely be a futile effort, I congratulate the instigators of this for making the effort. Instead of whining about upcoming age verification, they worked out a new model to show how it could be done.

mourna!
aww come give nina a big hug

Wotcha, Princess. :wave:

That's just it.. no matter what system one uses, be it Linden provided (which won't be mandatory for ALL accounts) or this, people are going to lie about it. It's not about protecting the children, but protecting the content creators and LL from needless lawsuits.

As far as I'm aware, using this violates the TOS disclosure provision too.



Although it's OK for someone to withhold services from someone if they're under 18, it _isn't_ ok for them to share this information with others via the agelock database.

From what I read on their FAQ page they don't share the information with anyone. They don't tell the landowner that an under-age person has been ejected, as near as I could see. It seems to just work quietly, they claim that you'll forget that it's even there, because it's quiet and unobtrusive.

-Atashi

I see no reason to mantain a list of people who at one point did not click they were over 18

I'm simply okay with a script that asks you if you are over 18 on arrival to a sim as a condition for remaining you must click "yes"

No reason for a black list of those who clicked under 18. (after all they are probably 18+)

In fact it would be counter productive since anyone on that list would be subject to being banned from SL entirely, thus no one will ever be honest if they were underage.

Plus someone my think its just arrival spam and click NO by default, and it had nothing to do with them not being over 18.

Clicking "No" should have no negative ramification other than not allowing you to visit that place that one time.

The information is shared via a database. To avoid sharing the information, every location would have to have its own agelock device, which had no communication with others.

Otherwise, the owner of the land owns the object which gathers the information, but this is then shared with the database server, violating the CS.

Here's an example of the kind of thing that could go wrong: I buy an AgeLock device. I buy some PG land. While you are on my PG land, I rez the AgeLock device. You say "hey, what's this requester asking me if I'm an adult? I thought this was PG!". From the fact that you saw it, I know you aren't in the database. Then, someone else comes along. I rez the AgeLock again. They make no comment. Now I know that they probably didn't see anything, which means they are already in the database, which means that not only do I know their date of birth is on file, I know they've accessed adult areas in SL. I'm sure you see the problem with that. What if a customer decides to quietly rez an agelock during a job interview to see if they get a reaction or not?

It's not totally worthless in case someone forgot the date they entered the first time

In order to sign up to SL you need to enter your/a birthdate which LL then associates with your account. Using AgeLock another resident does the same thing in-world. Does it help protect you any more that a resident has a collection of birthdates that LL already has anyway?

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The site also seems to suggest that you enter it in-world, which makes it public for anyone/anything within a 20m radius. Anyone could write up a mock version of AgeLock as well, wear it as an attachment and stand near a parcel's landing point.

This is easy to be (somewhat) secure against. Have the agelock use a random chat channel, and IM the instructions to the avatar in question. "blah blah blah to confirm your date please enter it in chat in this format: '/97 mm-dd-yyyy'" and then the avatar is chatting it relatively safely. It could use any positive integer as the chat channel and randomize them for every instance.

Counterfit agelocks are another thing, but then again, who cares what their birthdate is? Considering it's probably not the real thing anyways, there's really nothing you could do with it.

-Atashi

Units talk directly to Database. There is no communication in world on any channel. No typeing. Just pop up blue windows. There is no way to "listen in".

Yes one could create a script with just the dialog system to suck peoples Birthdates and having it imitate AgeLock. More fun to ask no? To stop people from putting it on others land we will look at making it so that it will only run on the owners land.

In perfect world there would be no need for AgeLock. The main grid is for adults and it clearly stated. We don't want to flag our land adult to avoid being AR'd to death. Flagging land adult means only those verified by LL/Aristotle will be allowed to enter, will also cost 50 or so cents. It is dangerous to put out personal information on the Internet, trust of the recipient, snoopers listening to traffic, key capture software on the computer placed by trojan horse viruses.

As currently stated residents are recommended to flag our land Adult if it has any content as such. We feel that with a mature flag and AgeLock we are covered. No need to give out ID numbers that can't be verified anyhow.

SL name and Birthdate is enough. 3 times users are questioned. Are you legal, Are you 18, what is DoB? We store the birthdate and SL name. That is it.

Currently it is free. It is set up to scann 100+ users at one time in a 96 meter radius.


see http://agelock.net


PS: PG land it seems is no longer PG. I raised issue with Lindens and they seem to care not unless there is "Activity" that is "Adult". Try searching "Sex" or "BDSM" with it set to only show non adult listings. Hundreds of listings for "Free Sex" and the like. However any word related to games of luck are verboten.** shrugs**

Is there any mechanism for preventing the case I described above?

I think the issue is not _just_ with storing names and birthdates, but the fact that you are also storing the fact that that particular avatar has visited places which have AgeLock enabled; in other words, you're fairly effectively logging the names of avatars involved in adult activity. I can think that many folks wouldn't want to be on a list like that..