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

I am completely 100% (and then some) against any mixing of the adult grid & the teen grid. If I won't play an multiplayer video game with children then I most certainly would not want to run into a teen on an ADULT grid. Isn't that the whole point of a teen grid & an adult grid?

Linden Lab should hire a real marketing team. There could have been a more positive spin put on this before it was rolled out. Give the adult content people their own showcase. Has there been any improvements in the verification process since 2007? (doubt it). Make verification apart of enrollment in SL. I am sure you can hire someone that can figure out how to intergrate gae verification into the enriollment process and not have negatively impact enrollment too much.

Stop the bait-and-switch Linden Lab and support the paying customers that got you where you are today.


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Age verification is a joke. Any 10 year old who gets access to Mom's purse or Dad's wallet can verify his age to LL's satisfaction. As many others have pointed out, anyone can get a credit card, and it's easy for a minor to get a verified Paypal account. My question is: Why have all of the negative fallout from age verification (disclosure of personal inffomation, etc.) when there is, in fact, no verification of age, just verification that the person has access to information about an adult, which almost all minors have? The only answer that I can think of is that LL thinks it can deflect criticism by pretending to verify age, even when the methods it uses are transparently ineffective.

LL has said that payment information was not sufficient for age verification for a long time. Now they are saying it is. Will they please tell us why their position has changed?

I would like to know what LL does with faxed paper information sent in response to a request for copy of a drivers license, birth certificate, etc. Does this information get destroyed once it is viewed or is it stored somewhere. I am concerned about identity theft, with information like this stored somewhere on a computer or in a file.

Providing payment information does not have anything to do with subscribing for a recurring SL Membership. All my alts have valid, current payment info on file. Not one if them, nor my main account, has any form of recurring membership fee subscription with LL.

How can this be accomplished, when the terraforming won't match up? The Mainland is not a flat, homogenous pool table. It has mountains, valleys, rivers and lakes. Take all the PG sims and try to make a continent from them, and the terraforming and land texturing would be pure chaos.

What about the Beta Age Verification System, which was installed some time ago? I verified there. Will this be the future AVS or not or part of it or whatever?

No I will NEVER give Linden Labs my payment info ...
If that means they exclude me be it ! I see this whole issue as an attempt to FORCE everybody to give his/her payment info - the thought is : "oh well lets get rid of those that dont pay for SL ... " Of course they think short as usual there ... if i feel forced to do someting my stubbornness kicks in ... and if this becomes reality Im out of here !!!

The current proposal is that the earlier beta Age Verification as well as having credit card info on file would be accepted as having proved adult status.

True. LL should do an official inquiry among the premium account holders, offer a few solutions and ask them for their opinion, anyway. Every lab decision on AVS and "adult-PG" which is not based on such a poll is rubbish and endangers the existance of SL. Btw., I really wonder how many ppl are really bothered with so called "adult" content. I am certainly not.

It would make more sense to divide mainland into commercial and residental areas. The clubs, bars and most public adult stuff will go to the commercial sims, where the mall shopping will be, and residental sims will be a much more pleasant place to be.

its about time they got this thing going. i have no problem making sure my parcel is age verified.


my only concern is, as an estate owner, do i have to age verify the entire sim, or can it be done per parcel. i have some residents who run non- adult businesses and makeing the entire sim age verified would hurt them.

The new adult designation, which is not the same as the existing age-verified designation, will only be able to be applied to an entire estate.

I wish to know that OUR details will be kept safe? a small idea could be a the ability to upload our passport images and details to a encrypted server on the site?

id rather do this than get my passport stolen in the post.

I understand your concern, but it isn't as difficult as it sounds.

Re the texture paks, SL only uses a limited number of those paks. The PG sims can be sorted into types (atoll textures, grass-based sims, snow-based sims etc) and then reassembled as those clusters. If there are one or two problem spots, tuck an extra sim in there between.

Re the terraform levels, SL has historically stuck to a rather narrow variance in most areas. So most sims will fit together with little difference (and the 4m edge can be "smoothed" afterward). And in the few cases where there's a sim that's unusually high, once again an extra sim could be tucked in next to it to "finish off" the cliff edge properly.

This would at least yield a more interesting and beautiful continent than some of the recent SL builds that have been miles of water or miles of flat green astroturf.

I suspect we would. I also suspect the burden would (again) be on child avatars to know an avoid these locations, or be barred from SL under the current ageplay statute. This was the dilemma I faced in my home sim a year ago when a group of people who would indeed fall under the adult category moved in next door: no one was sure if I was violating TOS by inadvertently living next to the open air BDSM/slave trade/bestiality area.

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This is one thing that is scaring me a bit about this, the notion that some users have told LL what it is that disturbs them about SL, and that LL's best solution is to segregate all those users (up to 4% of users - which is still a fairly sizable amount) to a separate continent. A lot of users are needlessly uncomfortable with child avatars, and I know there is a lot of resistance to us from some in LL. Will I be relegated to "kiddieland" and no longer allowed to share in the wealth of the SL world as a whole due to some vocal minority?
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Providing payment information is not the same as having a premium membership. Most of my alts have payment info on file, but I don't pay for premium membership or buy or sell linden dollars with those accounts (any more).

I think the CC info has actually expired by now, but the accounts are still flagged as "payment info on file".

The new rating applies to entire regions, but Blondin Linden says it's not mandatory for private islands, so... *shrugs*

So then what about those of us with no paypal, no bank account in my name, which you need to get a verified paypal account. no credit cards. Really, I have nothing with my name on it. Everything is in my fiances name. When I want lindens, they are purchased via his account. So what will people like me be able to do?

Originally Posted by TheAbsinthe Fairey
I believe a vast amount of Age verification could be acheived with a simple phone call. I for one have so far not used any RL money in World and do not intend to start now, However as a mature adult you can easily hear in my voice that I am no child

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Oh right, like every child has one of those handy LOL ! I am parent and was one of 6 children myself and not one of my sons or sisters friends had one of these " not very convincing" machines.
As for people with no voice ..I did say "A vast amount", and I stand by that!

Are you suggesting that the NWO (New World Order) , has made it's way into SL??

The balance between the RIGHT to privacy (not the mere suggestion of "respect) and the DESIRE to provide "credible" controls is woefully broken in the age verification system.

It is completely and totally unacceptable to require extremely sensitive data from customers (including passport, driver's license, national ID number, and SSN) except if required by law, or for certain specific things such as economic (banking, investment) matters. There's too many failure points that can cause . The first point of failure is in transmission of such data from the user to Linden Lab/ a third party such as Aristotle. A piece of malware such as spyware or a keylogger on one's PC can capture such data from the user end. Likewise, in mail transmission, scans of ID, provided info etc can be intercepted. Then there's the failure points on Linden Lab's end, or Aristotle's end. Companies far larger than Linden Lab or Aristotle have had security breaches resulting in the disclosure of personal information. Even if information is not stored, the possibility of a privacy breach is still maintained in Aristotle's security has been breached and transmitted personal information is intercepted on their end.

Age verification is bad business. Customers are correctly very weary of giving _any_ personal information to a company, especially online, and doubly so for social security numbers or ID's. Because of this, and the effort required to provide information in a secure manner, this dissuays use and will only hurt the economy.

Linden Lab would do well to read this primer by the ACLU on privacy and free speech as it relates to online business: http://aclunc.org/docs/technology/privacy_and_free_speech_it%27s_good_for_business.pdf In addition, I am sure the ACLU would eagerly help Linden Lab with policies that truly respect people's right to privacy, as it seems that Linden Lab's legal team is erring on the side of extreme legal caution at the expense of personal privacy.

Nope, doesn't work so simply.

While a given mainland parcel's terraform limits may only be +/- 4M from the initial terrain levels designed by Linden Lab, that original Linden Lab terraforming was over a MUCH wider range, and as you get closer to the "mountain ranges" on some mainland continents, the accumulated increase in elevation between there and the coastline makes a huge difference in elevation. Go visit the old North and South Continents, and see how much higher some of the snowy areas are, as oppsed to coastal deltas.

Grouping all the "snow parcels", "sand bar parcels", "rocky, mountanous parcels", "rolling gren grassy areas parcels" and similar classifications will make it a little closer to the original elevations, but the edges still will have a very wide variation between them.

You are right that anyone can get access to mummy or daddy's wallet. Then again you are assuming Lindens are stupid and can't tell that someone with "sk8ur95" in their email who registers their account with the name Naruto Ninja and gets reported all the time in Ahern playing fart noise gestures probably is not a 48 year old woman living in Ohio.

Register with a fake name and false ID at your own peril. Sounds more to me like a good way to get all your accounts shut down for good.

What I don't understand is why people are paranoid because a reputable company knows their RL identity or has their payment info. Hell, Google keeps track of every search query you ever made from your computer and IP. Which company do you think knows more about your dirty little secrets?

You are actually more at risk having your credit card or ID stolen by a waitress or store clerk than online. Even most online ID theft is by fake or unscrupulous online retailers. There is a difference between keeping your ID safe and just being plain paranoid.

I have just seen this latest wheeze from Linden and, to be perfectly honest, it makes my blood boil! The question I find myself asking is, "Have they gone mad?"
I have no issue with the idea of keeping underage people out of adult sims. Every sane adult in SL would want that. However, I find myself questioning the way they wish to implement age verification.
What they are asking for is totally unreasonable, illegal in some parts of the world and just plain stupid. What sane person is going to be stupid enough to divulge personal informatin such as Birth Certificate details, Driving Licence or Passport data or Bank Account information?
So, Linden Labs, think this out properly. The idea of protecting under age person from viewing adult material is laudable, but your way of verifying information is extremely ill-vised. Most people are not going to give you sensitive information and if you insist on this you will have a revolt which will lose you business and damage SL irrevocably.
So, think again before it is too late!

I think this needs a little clarification, Blondin:
"There are plenty of underage users already in SL. When we come across that, it is AR'ed and they are removed. Unfortunately, this current system doesn't work as well as it should - hence the new system."

If LL is aware that there are "plenty" of minors on the adult grid, then you must also know who they are, account info, etc. and are actively removing them. If you are removing them, then there are no longer "plenty" of them. Am I interpreting your statement correctly? I mean no disrespect, I just want to know how diligently the existing policy is being enforced and why it may be failing.
Realistically, there is no way to prevent minors from being on the adult grid and therefor the best system remains the EULA we all sign at account creation, which removes the liabilty from LL and precludes the need for a new system. Make sure the EULA has real teeth and is actively enforced when an offender is caught, up to and including legal action against the minor's parents/guardians. In the real world, this is almost always enough to not only protect the service provider from liabilty but also protectc the quality of service the other consumers expect.
Judging from what other residents have posted here already, a new system will not solve anything and only create more problems than it solves. Everything (almost) is optional in SL, including the desire to see or not see adult content. Personal choice is a mouse click away and when choice is fortified with personal responsibilty, a lot of issues tend to simply resolve themselves.
I think this is one of those issues.