Age Verification is here!!

Lol except for the person from the phone book who comes to SL and finds out their number of verified accounts is maxed out already, and they never even heard of SL till just now.

believe me, i know full well ll's motivation isnt a desire to protect children.
i totally see this as marketing/datamining/taxation/homeland security.

the avs post was directed at chip midnight, a ll altruist, whom obviously takes everything ll says as gospel. he's been here since the word go, so i would have thought he'd know better than that.

I blame his diet ... it's all that Lead they've been sucking

They're not obligated to, but they want to, because (1) they want SL to be seen differently from pr0n sites and (2) unlike pr0n sites, they have the teen grid, which actively attracts underage users to SL, combined with a very easy way to access the adult grid and all of the content there. Joe pr0nographer doesn't generally have a "PG-13" version of his pr0n site right next to his hardcore one that entices kids to the entire enterprise. Now, not that this makes a difference -- underage kids will find pr0n on the internet if they want to. But legally and in terms of law enforcement, the fact that LL has chosen specifically to attract kids to SL (even to their own grid) is something that creates additional risk for LL. In light of that I think LL just wants to insert age verification as a scheme in a way that is different from what the pr0n sites do, and then collapse the adult and teen grids together.

I don't take anything as gospel, from anyone, and unlike some others I could mention, I don't find casting LL as an inept evil empire as especially rational or useful. The reasons LL added this service for residents to use if they so choose seem rather obvious to me, and imperfect as it may be, I think this is a smart move for LL to make. Would you rather they just outright banned everything they think might get them into legal trouble rather than provide us with optional tools we can use to protect ourselves from liability while we continue to exercise our free expression? But hey, don't let logic get in the way of your LL bashing.

you havent even seen bashing mate.
im just wondering why sites like imagefap dont seem to have 'legal troubles', and why its users arent constantly 'at risk'.
ll is blowing smoke up your ass.

/me flashes on an image of Daniel Linden with a Mini-Me avatar.

"Can someone throw me a frickin' piece of pie here?"

Look Nina, this is simple. LL is taking the position that it's your responsibility to conform to your local laws with regard to the content you create or bring to SL and who you let access it, not theirs. By adding optional age verification and the ability for you to deny access to people who don't verify they have a concrete means of shifting that liability away from themselves and onto you. It's not about how effective the age verification process actually is. It doesn't matter. LL can now much more easily throw you to the wolves if you do something that raises the ire of government censors without jeapordizing themselves, and if that happens, you (if you used the service and limited access to your stuff), can demonstrate that you used all the tools at your disposal to conform to the law. Will it work? Who knows, but it seems obvious that that's the intent. LL wants to be seen like as ISP and not like the gatekeepers of a closed platform who would have to be responsible for everything that happens on the grid.

well based upon the reports of this verification ive seen it would be rather simple to argue that ll made a disingenuous effort to verify residents. if every sl blog is trumpeting the ease of rorting the system, and if people are sending ll tickets telling them 'beta verification is stuffed, i verified as tweety bird' and ll does nothing and 'stays the course' how can they claim to have made a good faith effort to verify the residents and 'protect the children', ESPECIALLY if they merge the grids in the near future.
furthermore, if you did have some pornographic material on your land and a kid lied his way onto the grid today and looked at your porn would you really be worried about the gmen coming to your rl door? even sex talk, is it even illegal to have cybersex with a teen?

Because every age verification system on the planet suffers the same problems, and because tasking a third party service with doing the verifying makes it Aristotle's problem, not LL's.

However, with announcements like Robin's blog entry about how it improves trust, protects minors from accessing content etc. it seems almost inevitable that someone/somewhere is going to take the system at face value, get burned and retaliate or else a journalist or lawyer will take advantage of all the flaws to take a shot at LL.

Whilst from a liability perspective LL can deflect that to Integrity, it will still be "SecondLife" in the headlines, it will be SL/LL's credibility which will risk damage and rather than improving trust within SL and making SL sound attractive to the organisations SLGrid.net is trying to target, it could very easily result in people and organisations being even more wary of SL.

Matthew

Matthew, can you suggest a better alternative? This was done in response to image problems SL already has. Most people think SL is nothing but a haven for porn addicts, fans of beastiality, and pedophiles, all sanctioned and condoned by LL. What do you think they should do to address that perception? How would you keep minors off the grid? Seems to me this is a clear case of damed if they do and damned if they don't.

get rid of free accounts.

If you'd check my previous posts you would know - credit card validation via a small transaction:

a) yes, this would involve a small transaction fee (say a US$1 or some other nominal sum) which would not be popular but the proposed IDV will also involve a nominal fee anyway

b) unlike passport/ssn/driving license ids, such a transaction would result in the card holder being notified (via the card's statement), so fraudalent use, a child "borrowing" a card etc. would be spotted.

c) a child would think longer and harder about stealing money from a parent's credit card, than entering their date of birth!

d) unlike passport/ssn/driving license ids if a credit card number is compomised, it is very easy to cancel and get a new one

e) yes, minors can have credit cards, but in such cases it is the responsibility of the parents to ensure that the card is used responsibly (in many cases the parents would have to have given authorisation and probably have some form financial liability for their child's card and probably get or see copies of credit card statements!)

f) yes, it is the case that VISA have a statement saying it is not appropriate for verifying age, but that is really to avoid liability on its part

g) yes, not everyone would be happy using a credit card to identify but a large number would be more prepared (mainly due to b and d) to than give personal ids (as mentioned a UK government depart. discovered via a survey that people wouldn't even want to give a govt supplied id to a govt website!)

h) there would be no suspicion that LL were asking for more information than could actually be verified against.

i) CC companies do have the bill payer's name, address and typially date of birth on file and have a vested interested in making due the name and address of the payer are up to date!

yes, a credit card is not a perfect or foolproof system by any means but it does offer a number of advantages over the proposed system (as above) and *is* a more familiar and accepted mechanism: people are generally aware of its limitations so it is less likely to cause the false sense of security the proposed system would, and doesn't raise LL's profile in the same way that going with a radical new system which turns out to be fatally flawed does.

Matthew

Matthew, wouldn't that foil the plan of removing annonimity from us? How could we forge that bond of trust with each other that LL seems to think we are incapable of doing otherwise. Yes, your idea may have flaws, but I don't see it as any more flawed than the present scheme.

As regards the perception, doing nothing would result in the perception remaining the same - making a big deal of doing something which turns out to be just smokes and mirrors for the sake of doing something will only reinforce the perception! Doing something is not always the best solution!

Matthew

I like Robin but she really needs to stop trying to make this out to be a trust issue. Having verified myself, I would trust someone with the payment info on file tag more than I would trust someone with the verified tag because payment info on file has a much better audit trail.

Never mind that most of the online safety websites tell people not to reveal the sort of info LL seem to be encouraging people to reveal. In terms of trust they're way off the mark.

A little bit of honest from LL would be helpful here, because the only advantage I can see with identity verification are that if a verified minor is exposed to something they shouldn't see, then it's Integrity Aristotle who need to answer questions, not LL, not the landowner.

See my other posts about the blog post not understanding the relationship between trust and anonymity

Knowing someone's name as Robin said makes you more likely to trust that person - however it does not make that person more trustworthy. Every conman knows this, the first thing they will do is show you an id card, a name, an address. To be honest you should probably be *more* wary of someone willing to volunteer their name and address!

Stripping away anonymity to improve trust is dangerous - it will make people feel that they can be more trusting when in fact northing has really changed to make people more trustworthy. If anything you should be encouraging people to be more wary not more trusting within online environments!

However, knowing arbitrary peices of information of a persons real life is not what trust is based on. Trust is based on your own personal history of transactions with that person, combined with recommendations of other whom you currently trust plus a mixture of judgement, context, what you stand to lose if betrayed and risk - we already have all that is necessary for that within SL, as the fact that trust relationships already build up.

Then there is the whole question of whether the properties of your real life persona have any bearing on your SL persona - as many people find, not just the role players but also those who original come in viewing their avatar as purely a virtual extension of themselves, thier online persona achieves some level of indepedence from their RL selves (this is of course a sliding spectrum), in the same way that actors and writers feel their characters have some indepedence from themselves. The whole identity verification system seems to overlook this very fundamental philosophical aspect of SL.

Matthew

Stripping away anonymity acts as a deterrent to bad behavior, which implies that we should be able to trust people more. But honestly, seeing how it's a joke, it doesn't change much of anything in terms of trust. It's just a great big shell game.

Matthew, you don't have to be over 18 to be issued a credit card. CC verification isn't valid as a form of age verification because age of consent to view adult material is not a prerequisite to being a legitimate cardholder. You can get a Visa or Mastercard debit card with a checking account at age 16.

Unless I was in a high profile RL job, or had done enough damage to you that it was worth the cost and effort of launching an international legal case (in which case you could sub peona LL for my identity or at least the address on my credit card), revealing my real name is not going to be a real deterent. It may however make you feel more comfortable trusting me!

About the worst you could do would be send me hate e-mail to my RL e-mail account or perhaps send mail to my friends and work colleague (I could shrug you off as some psycho I met in SL who is now hounding me).

However, there will be plenty of perfectly trustworthy people who are in high profile RL jobs or are worried about picking up an online stalker, who will not reveal their real names!

Matthew

See point in my original post



True - there is a grey area when someone is old enough to leave home and hence parental/guardian oversight but not yet old enough to access adult material on the internet, where the credit card system fails - but so does the proposed system which at present is verifying if someone is over 18, whereas in some places the require age of consent may be as high as 21!

Or, putting this another way - under a credit card system it is possible we may have some 16 year olds falsely age verifying without their parent or guardians knowing - but very unlikely (but not impossible) that we would have an 10 year old age verifying with their own or a parents credit card without the parents discovering it. However with Integrity's sytem it is far more likely that some 10 year old will falsely age verify with a parents passport or driving license (or outside the US, date of birth!) without the parents discovering it. Neither is ideal, but which sounds worse to you?

As I said, I am not claiming that a credit card base system is 100% foolproof or anywhere near that. It isn't, it has problems. I am claiming however that it far more advantages over the Integrity solution than the Integrity solution has (if any) over credit cards.

Matthew

I'd happily do a transaction with LL from my id verified in person, 18+ only, bank account.

Ah, well, this is the sort of basis that the more promising online identity verification systems work. You have an identifier, you can assign properties (such as name, age, gender) to that identifier, and you get other people to vouch that those properties are accurate (using PKI signing techniques to validate the vouch)

Whether you believe those properties depends on whether you trust the people vouching for those properties! Where this gets powerful is when organisations (banks, universities, governments) vouch for those properties.

LL them just needs to list the organisations it trusts for vouching age.

These systems are still in infancy but IMHO LL would be better spearheading this sort of system if it wanted to use a leading edge identity verfication system and using the imperfect credit card base system in the interim.

These system also provides a much better measure of trustworthiness than trying to equate trust with anonymity (or lack thereof).

Matthew