Upcoming Changes for Adult Content: Account Verification for Accessing Adult Content

It protects Linden Labs. But it does absolute butkus to protect anyone providing adult content in-world. If a minor gets access to someone's adult content in-world, LL will be protected from all liability. The content creator/club owner/etc. will not be. "I didn't know she was underage" has never worked as a legal defense in the real world; it will not work in a virtual world either.

I understand that a minor can get into the main grid right now by falsifying his or her credentials; however, the onus is still on LL to take action against anyone they catch doing so. Once the grids merge, though, LL effectively absolves themselves of this responsibility by employing an age-verification system which everyone already knows only keeps honest people honest, and passes the responsibility onto its residents.

Any way you slice it; any way LL tries to sugar-coat it - merging the two grids is a really, really terrible idea. There is quite simply NO feasible way to keep teens away from adult content without *severely* disrupting the entire SL world and exposing the entire adult community to grave legal consequences.

This simply will not end well.

*Duplicate Post Deleted*

the current system is 100% useless anyways.
I have set a small piece of land to "Allow verified individuals only", and it makes NO difference on who can enter and who can not.

I believe that person is yet another premium account holder who believes that premium accounts should not only be extra-privileged beyond the bennies they already receive, but to the point of crippling basic accounts to near-uselessness.

May I say NO!

This is b*ll*x.

Neptune is a premium account holder with payment details on file, my public face in SL, but why should that prevent my free account from logging in and selling items I create?

I create with my free account mainly, who has no friends, no distractions, with my free account I use SL as a design program nothing more.

I doubt I am alone, infact I know I am not alone.

I have a sandbox for other people unfortunate enough to afford the over inflated price of SL, to come and use freely.

They are able to do this as I have effectively payed for their tier.

Why should they be unable to sell the items they spend hours creating.
Without land set correctly, you cannot create in SL, my point is someone has actually payed tier for free accounts to have the ability to create.

Yes SL has Linden areas where building can take place but these areas are few and far between.

Back in April 2008, when I first accessed SL, I tried to verify my age. I could not, since at that time non-US documentation was not recognised by the system. I used my credit card to verify my account. I assume that it was, and remains adequate proof of my identity and my age.

I have posted elswhere my reaction to this proposed chage and I do not intend to raise my blood-pressure again.

Does this change really mean that all no-premium accounts without payment information on file must age-verify? If that is so, more adequate means of providing that information MUST be inplace well before ANY changes are made.

This whole thing is utterly stupid and ill-conceived.

The comments made by Clarissa Lowell and Glimmer Silverstar make me shudder - are LL really so commercially unscrupulous?

Please never ever add the teen grid to the main grid. Kids add NOTHING usefull to the main grid. They grief, aint got $$$, and by american standards you don't want' em overhear a lotta conversation in a mature sim or dance club. Some sneak in, getting the whole load just adds more trouble.

Click off the google filter and you get loads of real porn but virtual toon sex is bad. Aight. 0.o

Locks yes, but not giving a set of keys and identity to a 3rd party to hold. How many cases of Data loss are there recently? Identity theft? All this for the protection of whom? Not the kids.

Now it is said this will not apply to private islands. So once again what is this for? Not about protecting kids from adult content. You are verified if you have an XStreet account it is said. That is what it is about, pure and simple. SPEND money. Give us your CreditCard or banking information and we will consider you an adult.

So by having a bad system kids get less protection because people's guard is let down. "O they are verified, no need to be wary even though they seem childish." So this all does the reverse of what it was intended to do.

I am willing to predict that the merge of the two grids, teen and adult, will happen before the beginning of summer. Why? Cause it means money. Think about all those kids being able to spend money. Buy dresses. Buy Lindens.

The other great can of worms is.... what is adult content? Who's standards? Thailand it is showing weapons or smoking. UK it is ???? US it is any tits and ass but shooting someone is allowed. Japan tits and ass are legal just no pubic hair. Saudi it is showing a bit of ankle or being in presence of male who is not brother, son or father.

None of this was thought about. Just ..... Give us your CC info and you are legal. Fact that XStreet has security flaws according to previous posting is timely.

Timely it is also that in Jan 2009 the US Supreme Court has killed COPA as being unconstitutional.

"After 10 Years, an Infamous Internet-Censorship Act is Finally Dead

Today's decision marks the end of the road for COPA, a federal law that violated the First Amendment by imposing civil and criminal penalties on commercial website operators that publish sexually explicit material without also using credit card authentication or other technological measures to verify viewer age and block access by minors."

Which of my comments and why? I don't recall accusing LL of anything, just wondering aloud what this is all about. (And, okay a tidge of shock and grousing.) We haven't as yet been told, that I have seen, why these drastic measures. The posts about possible dangers were intended to point up how south 'information gathering' can go - not about claiming LL has certain motives. I just plain do not know why. Whatever "commercially unscrupulous" might refer to, I never claimed they were.

I wanted to say this to Teggs' post (quoted here):



For some of us, protecting our personal data IS the lock, which protects our life.

Sweden.
And yes I can tell you my name and home address, but not license plate number or especially not the SSN and similar.
It all has to do with what is considered "harmless" information by the authorities and what's not. At least that is what the government has told us here, and they should know, right?
So verifying is a bit tricky to do from here, honestly.
We are also told here all the time to never send personal data on the net, especially not unless the data is sent secured to a trusted part, and definitively not abroad.

And many parents are far more concerned about the dangers of unknown adults gaining access to their children, than the (lesser) dangers of children gaining access to unknown adult material.

Matthew

Try putting "Not applicable" or "Not permissible to be given" in the box asking for SSN etc. in the Aristotle system.

It has been known to work, and technically you are not providing false information either...

Matthew

I think a warning is enough. Coz what i am concerning is security problem, I don't wanna put any of my RL on the web even in RL. I will keep away from putting personal information on the web. Unless i need ti buy a product online. However, secondlife is just a game if it needs Age Verification I will quite the game totally.

This is the parents responsibility not us. They gave birth to their children. They have the responsibility to look after theirs.

Sorry, but I think so:
I'm from europe, as a lot of residents have already state it here that giving harmless informations are not allowed, and that credit card are allowed for minors.
And , btw, NOT ALL people have credit card...!
I understand you need to protect SL from trials, but as it have been said, all the web is working with Porn, and all the verification system have always been a way to make money, for some sites, and they died..

of course, a simple checkbox to confirm that we are adult may not be ok, in a case court.
so, here my suggestion, simple, but much more effective than a check box :
as you have put voice in Sl, use it:

on the account page, or in SL: one time verification process, once logged in:
-turn the voice on, check your microphone:
repeat the following sentence:
"I attest and swear that i'm over 18 (or more) and i'm in legal age to view adult content"
(that's juste an exemple, it should be translated in others language)
SL keep that sentence , and the account become an adult content.

What does anyone here think about that ?

meanless to say, as it's a one time verification, people can always find a computer with a microphone on it .
voice computer verification can be set up quite easily, to be sure that the sentence is the good one

I should be sorry to leave Second Life just because i have no way to prove that i'm over 40

Question
All ppls with unverified accounts with adult content in their inventory....
what happens here?

Just make a Disney continent.. and let ppl chose whether they want to go out into the wild wild world.

Thats what real life is like.

I deeply agree.. and what happen to builders of adult content, objects, and so on ?
Sl is loosing a lot of people every month, according to Alexa.com. It's sad for me to say that, but an credit card verification process can have the same effect that the "non gambling laws", years ago,

my voice system could be dissuasive for youngs, as their voice can be recognised, and not intrusive for adults who can't or don't want to give private informations.

Sorry, I think you missed my point. If LL *were* to merge the teen and adult grids, the real concern of responsible parents, would not be that their children may now have access to unknown adult material, but that unknown adults may now have access to their children.

The obvious solution which any parent would have would be to prohibit their children from using such a merged SL (even if they had previously been happy for their children to use a teen only SL).

Merging the grids would reduce the legitimate use of SL by teens, not increase it.

Matthew

Though I am verified with my c.card, I have about 17 bots who are always active to keep up traffic in my mall. This is going to be a pain if I have to get verification for each of them. I wonder if you only need to veryify once and then remove c.card details so I am not paying for membership 18 times..... this smacks of greediness and income generation for Lindens...... already its incredibly expensive for those outside the USA as exchange rates are so bad.

If it means verifying every alt, then I will probably leave and go elsewhere, SL isnt the only virtual community.

Fed up..........

You are absolutely correct when you state that there will not be an easy solution to this proposed endeavor.

When considering how best to implement such a system that would restrict underage players from accessing the soon to be designated restricted areas, how would this potentially apply to adult role-players who play as children in SL? Is it possible that these child avatars would have access to sexually explicit areas because the member is verified as an adult?

The challenges ahead are monumental and solutions will not be easy nor embraced by everyone.

The problem is however that I may be a person that thinks that "Let people have their sex beds, their nude beaches, their consensual BDSM on simple Mature sims" is too extreme.

And by the way, that 1% you talk about IS consensual.

For me, this is just another step towards the complete control of people worldwide for the new one world government police state that is being set up, more commonly known as the New World Order. Fool the people into thinking there is a need to have people use ID to prove who they are. In case people don't know, passports haven't existed that long, and ID even less. There has never been a need for it, and there never will be except for those that want to control us all.

In my previous post (120) I showed how this can be solved. I have no problem with people not wanting to come across adult material and having LL protect them from it. But that doesn't need age verification.

So, there's a silver lining after all?

In Germany, I have seen full frontal huge billboard ads with males and females that children walk passed on their way to school. Obviously, the Germans don't see this as a problem.

Parents should decide what their children can see or do, and LL should find a way to help those adults that don't want any unwanted access to adult material or activities without making demands from those that do.

Then let us act like adults, and don't force us to do things we don't want to do.

Give us choice, rather than restrictions.

Swap around all the PG sims into one continent, people have already chosen to live
in them. Create an Adult continent and let people *choose* to move there if they want.

Create client settings for PG/Mature/Adult which controls where you can teleport to
based on the region setting, and make the Adult setting only work if you have *chosen*
to verify.

But please don't force people to move or verify if they don't want to.

Sorry, wrong. The existence of gift credit cards available at most banks and drug stores makes using such cards useless for verifying anything. Even if an adult is required to get
the card in the first place, it can be given to *anyone* to use afterwards.