Fun with Age Verification Alternatives

Credit Card validation blocks many minors, but discourages many non-minors too. Minors still get in even with CC validation anyway, but in smaller numbers.

I've seen 3 main complaints:
1) Fear of litigation for exposing minors to adult material.
2) Complaints of fraud and griefing behavior
3) Concern that folks that sign up without a CC are less likely to support LL (membership/tier) or buy L$ from the Lindex from other citizens.

SecondLife is an international community, and credit cards are no proof of age. If there is no 'big brother database' that can be consulted to verify both the identity and the age of a new citizen, then what can we do?

We can decide for ourselves.

Add a 4th category to the Ratings, called MATURITY.

Stick with the L$25 fee for setting it.

Let folks give positive or negative MATURITY ratings.

Block all new avatars from MATURE sims until their "maturity" rating is +5 or better.

Newbies pestering people for "Mature ratings" are going to get neg rated.

Newbies that might want to get into mature areas may be less likely to grief.

Sure some minors may be mature enough to fool people in SecondLife into rating them 'mature'.

Great flaws:
Many adults will probably get rated immature and banned from mature sims, either because they're immature, or out of spite.
If someone unjustly gets rated immature and banned from MA sims, let them bypass the 'MA sim ban' by submitting a credit card for validation.

Some minors will still be clever enough to fool people into marking them mature. Sure there will probably be 'maturity rating' farmers selling their blessing for a profit. No system is going to be perfect.


It might, however, go a long way towards promoting world peace.



--
(yet another "so absurd, it just might work" idea from the broken mind from Teal)

Yes, this would make the "SL mafia" even stronger. I remember in TSO there was a mafia that gave red balloons (I think?), which for anyone that hasn't played TSO, was a negative/bad thing. Fun times!

This is a really bad idea.

I mean, seriously, just about anyone can find -five- friends to rate them positively. There, done. Doesn't matter how old you are, you're in. So long as you can make friends, you can be an adult! Hurray!

No, let's not turn mature content into a popularity contest.

I'm not saying it isn't a bad idea, just different, and with merit.

Depending on CC validation is a bad idea too.

Back in RL... Try proving your age by showing a credit card?
You'll get laughed out of the bar.

We, as a community, should be able to decide for ourselves who gets treated as Adult or Juvenile.

If WE are at going to be held responsible and accountable for our content... then WE need the power to decide who gets treated as an adult and who doesn't.

How someone acts speaks volumes to their maturity level, not necessarily their age. Yes, I know "the law" thinks of it as an age issue, not a maturity issue, but if we can't check driver's licenses and passports at all... this has a good chance of being more effective than some random credit card number.

Sure gaggles of underage newbies will try having their little maturity rating parties, but without sign-up bonuses or new basic stipends, someone is going to have to buy L$125 per person.

And once those newbies storm off into the world with their trumped up maturity rating it won't take long for people to correct that rating. Heck, make it so that only people with a +5 maturity rating can GIVE maturity ratings.

Yes, this does mean that there will be minors in the grid, but limited to PG sims.

Yes, I'm aware that it creates a class-based society. (The 'Separate but Equal' TeenGrid is doing better as an alternative?)

But this plan works well as both carrot and stick. If non-paying customers want access to adult content... make them conduct themselves as adults rather than relying on bogus external validation.

Who knows, it might even get people to quit with the 'age-play' behavior. Pedophilia is 'the new leprosy' in society today. If someone likes a fake substitute for something, it's reasonable to assume they'd probably like the real thing too. I'm for tolerating a lot of things... but not this. Even if SL checked driver's licenses and passports for age verification.

The law uses age as a gauge only because it's a measurable thing. Maturity has no measures.

Maturity has a far-from-perfect but decent correlation with age and that's why the age measure works to a large extent.

The above statement means that you can still have mature kids and immature adults.

Age is not a perfect determinant of maturity. Credit cards are not a perfect determinant of age, nor of maturity. Hence Philip says it right that credit cards are not and never were a good gauge of age or maturity.

Any attempt to verify age fails because of one important point: The computer has no way of knowing who is at the keyboard.

If a kid gains access to his parent's porn site access, he can go there and the site will have absolutely no way of knowing that it's not the parent.

That leaves us with only one workable solution: Best efforts.

Philip again says it right that all that really can be done is to catch them as you see them. It's not reliable but I don't know of any method more reliable than that.

Reputation rating systems don't work. They never did, they never will. Such systems fail due to a fundamental issue: the systems require that voters be honest and objective.

Requiring the voters to be honest and objective defeats the basic underpinning of the reputation system outright.

Those are some fun ideas. I think though ultimately you have to use judgement and common sense, and try to make decisions accordingly. I have been spending some time lately in some of the more adult/mature areas of SL, where I see a steady stream of brand new avatars, default skin and hair, some with payment info and some without. I have tried to make it a policy to spend some time getting to know a person first before passing judgement on their maturity. It is wise to exercise some caution when seeing today as the creation date, regardless of payment status.

I find that the "older" an avatar is, the more likely that the age question does not come to my mind, because the youngins don't seem to hang around SL for the long term.

Um, how does anyone get their +5 rating in order to give a 'Maturity' rating? Someone would need to have an initial +5 rating in order for that ball to start rolling. You've got a slight 'chicken-and-egg' situation there. And, no, I don't think it would be a good idea as it would not only be gamed but also abused.

I do think charging even a penny to a credit card will alert parents to their children using it to access an adult site. Cause personally I would be livid if mine did that.

Heck whats wrong with leaving some bit of motivation for getting verified or investing in this community interaction
deal we have here.
Besides what can you really do in a mature sim that you cannot
do in a PG sim. Hahaha, I mean if that is all they are coming here for it seems a bit revealing.

I say throw down a cutoff date, and quit allowing new unverifieds into the mature sims until they get some payment
info on file.

I have heard of some adults who all they wanted to do in SL
was gamble well I think you can do that in PG.

(Realizing that, that is a completely different set of concerns
there)

I mean refusing the opportunity to people who refuse to
give any identifying info whatsoever to participate in activities
that could possibly put an honest dealer of mature fun into
a compromising position sounds perfectly fair to me.

"Selling +M @ 1 per L$100! IM me"

Yes, I can so see this idea in action, in all its glory.

You should just ask where they were when Kennedy got shot.

Yeah if you are only going to allow ppl 50 and up on.. (43 actually, but hey)

That's because a better method for verifying age exists in RL.

We really need to brainstorm and come up with another way to find out peoples' age. Europeans and other non-USA people ask me for another way to prove their age... My reply is usually "I don't know really. One person showed me his personal website with pics, and his business site with a contact email address."
I realize this isn't enough to actually prove anything, but it's a good start. Does anyone have any other ideas? There are lots of really talented and sexy avatars that I would like to have in my group who don't have access to Visa, MasterCard, etc...