Open Letter to Linden Lab Management regarding Age Verification in Second Life

Having to give out personal information that is generally used only by banks, tax agencies and the government as a "last bastion" against identity theft, just to access an online service (or parts of an online service) just isn't reasonable.

Do you realize that Integrity is the service that the banks, large entertainment companies and now Anheuser-Busch are using for verification? You've probably already used Integrity in the course of accessing your online banking information. Why is this such a dangerous path for Linden Lab to use the same service?

Stop making it "voluntary", and force everyone to verify or not log in - that then stops any stigma that may be attached to the flagging. The Linden Lab "free for all" pipe dream might have worked well in the sixties, but doesn't work in today's environment. After all, no other game/world/platform/whatever gives you free unlimited access forever; there are reasons for this I am sure.

Do you realize that Integrity is the service that the banks, large entertainment companies and now Anheuser-Busch are using for verification? You've probably already used Integrity in the course of accessing your online banking information. Why is this such a dangerous path for Linden Lab to use the same service?

That is the main part of my concern. I have no problem proving that I am legally over 18 (I could almost verify that twice) and having a mark on my profile stating that I am - but I certainly don't want every horny sleazeball hitting on me thinking I'm going to cyber with him (or her, I guess) simply because they read the tag as "I want sex".

Stop making it "voluntary", and force everyone to verify or not log in - that then stops any stigma that may be attached to the flagging. The Linden Lab "free for all" pipedream might have worked well in the sixties, but doesn't work in today's environment. After all, no other game/world/platform/whatever gives you free unlimited access forever; there are reasons for this I am sure.

Broccoli

[10:12] Daniel Linden: it’s vaulted to provided a government-required audit trail for two years, but neither Linden or Integrity can access that data unless an audit is initiated.

Stop making it "voluntary", and force everyone to verify or not log in - that then stops any stigma that may be attached to the flagging. The Linden Lab "free for all" pipedream might have worked well in the sixties, but doesn't work in today's environment. After all, no other game/world/platform/whatever gives you free unlimited access forever; there are reasons for this I am sure.

Broccoli

It is *entirely* possible that at some future date linden lab may decide voluntary opt-in "mature parcel" flags are insufficient and declare that entry into all mature sims requires age verification.

Open letter to Linden Lab Management, and specifically addressed to:

Philip Rosedale - Founder and CEO, Linden Lab
Robin Harper - Vice President, Community Development and Support
Ginsu Yoon - Vice President, Business Affairs


Dear Philip, Robin and Ginsu,

Our company KI Media has had a presence in Second Life since December 2006. We run a large successful swingers dating website at http://www.swingersfunclub.nl. Swingers are couples that are in search of other couples for erotic experiences. Our members are of all ages (18 to 65+) and come from all social classes and include (but not limited to) people with public professions like artists, police officers, lawyers and politicians.

Before we came to Second Life, the primary means of communication between our members was by webmail and by using the chatrooms on our website. When we learned of Second Life we saw the potential of having 3D avatar based chat over conventional chat systems. We also evaluated competitive environments like Active Worlds and Outer Worlds. The choice for using Second Life was primarily based on usability, the high level of personal freedom, and the fact that Second Life was accessible to all of our community members without any obstacles (financial or otherwise).

Establishing our presence involved buying an Island and building a Swingers Club as a central meeting place for our members. The island now also features houses for our members and a shopping mall for Swingers Lifestyle related merchandise. Since the opening we have actively promoted Swingers Funclub in SL as our community chatroom, which resulted in extended news media coverage because we were the fist party to establish a virtual Swingers Club in Second Life. Although we do not have explicit sexual photographic content, some of the graphics used on our island are of an erotic nature. Our members who visit our club are usually in search of contacts that are erotic in nature as well. That is why we have marked our Island settings as being a "Mature" island.

We have been reading the announcements on the linden blog regarding the age verification system with great concern. On the official linden blog it is written at Thursday, May 10th, 2007:

"you will need to verify age only if you want to enter parcels/estates flagged as containing adult content"

Although we welcome any initiative that makes Second Life more secure, we have serious objections against the announced identity verification system. Access to the grid is already regulated by your terms of service (TOS), which states in article 2.2:

"Users under the age of 18 are prohibited from accessing the Service [...] By accepting this agreement in connection with an Account outside the Teen Area, you represent that you are an adult 18 years of age or older".

This means that anybody under the age of 18 accessing the main grid is in violation of the TOS, and any legal liability for doing so lies entirely by the offending person, their parents or their legal guardians.

We can understand that you would like to give island owners and parcel owners the opportunity to deny access to accounts that do not have an age verification flag set. However this should be a choice to be made by the owners of the land, and not enforced by Linden Lab. In the TOS under which we bought our island it is stated in article 1.2:

"Linden Lab is a service provider, which means, among other things, that Linden Lab does not control various aspects of the Service.
You acknowledge that Linden Lab is a service provider that may allow people to interact online regarding topics and content chosen by users of the service, and that users can alter the service environment on a real-time basis. Linden Lab generally does not regulate the content of communications between users or users' interactions with the Service"

The announced age verification is in violation with the Second Life TOS. When Linden Lab denies age-unverified members access to our island, it is then actively regulating interaction between users, and between our customers and our service. Linden Lab should behave like a service provider as specified by the TOS and not intervene in communication or content, unless the intervention is required by order of a court of law.

Age-unverified only means that a person's age has not been verified, it does not mean that a person is not of adult age. The nature of our Swingers Lifestyle Community is such that our members do not want to be officially registered as being interested in erotic content or related activities. This is especially the case for people who have public functions like artists, police officers, lawyers and politicians. From the protests that come out of the broader Second Life Community we understand that the majority of the Second Life population does not wish to be officially registered as being interested in erotic content or related activities either.

You may be well aware of the fact that your customers have no control whatsoever over the extend to which their identity information is going to be stored, used or sold by any 3rd party. We assume you have made a legally binding agreement with the 3rd party prohibiting the use or disclosure of identity information. But even then, when that 3rd party goes bankrupt or changes ownership, such agreements become void and the identity information could then be used or sold by any party that gains ownership over that information.

We hereby would like to state that Swingers Island is our virtual property, and the choice to who to allow access to our island is entirely ours. We believe the responsibility for being the legal age is entirely with the visitor and we are against enforcing this identity registration and verification system.

We are seeing that the majority of the Second Life population is rejecting the announced age verification system as well. This means that when Linden Lab is going to restrict access to our island there will be substantially less visitors. Fewer visitors to our island will ultimately have financial consequences for our company, for which we will hold Linden Labs entirely responsible. Such liability may ultimately also include the investments in time and money already made in developing our Second Life property.

Therefore we would like to ask you urgently to guarantee unrestricted access to our island for all our customers.

Kian Stardust
KI Media
The Netherlands

Phone +31-20-6920737
Fax +31-20-6920734

Just a few comments on this well-articulated, but otherwise pointless "Open Letter".

Participating in the age verification program does not label you, or "register" you as you put it, as being interested in erotic content, or any other content of any particular nature. It simply sets a flag on your account which indicates you are at or over the age of consent. For your members, this poses no risk of exposure beyond that which currently exists. For your management, it provides a mechanism to ensure that those accessing your content are of legal age to do so, completely removing this burden from you, short of setting your region and parcel flags appropriately.

Your observation that the majority of the Second Life population are rejecting the announced age verification system is dubious at best. If you have devised a method to accurately take the pulse of the community at large, I'm certain the rest of us would be very interested in knowing what you have come up with. The noise here in the forums is contained to a relatively small fraction of the community, and cannot be relied upon to arrive at the conclusion you have.

As for your reference to the section of the Terms of Service you feel this program would cause Linden Lab to "violate", elsewhere in same said document, it states:

3) The methods of verification are actually illegal in some countries; handing out personal information such as passport or ID number to a company based in a foreign country is prohibited. You don't give these details for the guy from Africa who needs your help to get $10 million out of the country from a secret bank account of someone who died in a plane crash, so why should this be any different?

I am not saying I will not verify if NON-SEXUAL places I like to frequent end up behind Adult lines. Only that I will be checking what LL asks for against my local laws and recomendations and if it turns up illegal or just plain stupid they will likely loose one of many legitimate users from the grid, and I am sure a fare number of companies as well. I personnally will not commit a crime just to reopen access to certain areas of the grid because they turn up pointlessly flagged adult because of some stupid concern or another. Guess what those companies will also leave SL because it just does not have the usership to justify the expense.

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After all, no other game/world/platform/whatever gives you free unlimited access forever; there are reasons for this I am sure.

The irony is, there are plenty of web sites out there where you can access all sorts of pornography just by clicking a button that says "I am 18 or older", so it's really questionable whether any system is needed at all.

Well, without age verification, your best swinger may be your 14 yr old daugher, and you would never know.