In December, Linden launched age verification in Grid-wide beta, and barely a word has been heard since, other than a post that it wasn’t working so well in certain countries. The purpose of age verification was “as Robin Linden explained… to increase trust, by enabling Residents to voluntarily verify parts of their identity, and giving content creators and landowners the ability to restrict access to content that is inappropriate to minors.”
But the only change in trust has been loss of it with Linden.
There was a great deal of speculation as to why Linden chose to implement age verification, with their main response being an offset of the responsibility for the potential accessing by minors of mature content to land owners. For all their talk about identity verification as a way to build up trust, the new system had no toggle ability for personal information other than “yeah, I’m legal”. While future iterations of the age verification process might have included the ability to unshield name, location, and other information, there has as yet been no sign that either there are future iterations planned, or that they can in fact get the system to work.
What’s troublesome is that even with age verification in place, Linden is banning age verified users based on filed complaints from others. Here’s the scenario, and it’s a real one:
- User, who is legal age, verifies through Linden approved system
- Age verification is processed, and the user is confirmed through Linden’s approved age verification partner
- Other user submits a complaint to Linden that the user is actually underage (and as always, the complainant is anonymous and the details kept from the person accused)
- The user is NOT underage, has been age verified, and further has payment information on file
- User is banned by Linden for being underage.
Hmmm. OK, so let me get this straight. Linden is claiming that age verification is useful because it provides a method for allowing residents, Linden, and land-owners a way to insure that restricted content can’t be accessed by minors. Linden defends its choice of ID verification partner. Users voluntarily use this system to age verify and then Linden in essence says “Well, someone on the grid doesn’t believe you, so we’re pulling your plug.”
Linden’s attempts to use IDV to establish trust have failed, and worse, they’ve demonstrated hypocrisy, sloppy system application, and a lack of sound reasoning.
Whether Beta or not, banning a resident as being underage who has used their verification system either expresses their lack of confidence in verification itself, higher confidence in unsubstantiated claims by residents, or simple poor judgement.
I am a full-time child avatar. I am and always have been emphatically against having <18 people on the main grid for reasons that need no further explanation. Before December I had a few lines in my 1st life profile citing the TOS and threatening to report underage residents I would come across. In December a two cases EXACTLY as you describe entered my purview. Now, I cannot in good conscience turn someone in for “underage”. Without a way to appeal, and with such poor (read, “zero”) review and investigation policies, and the extent of the sensitive personal documentation that must be provided to a third party to clear one’s name for this thing, the threat of wrongly punishing the innocent is simply too great. I removed this blanket statement from my profile. In the current state of affairs would never submit an AR against someone for “Underage” even if they admitted it in open chat. (I would however avoid them and ban them from my land.)
Adz:
Difficult decisions and it sounds like you’ve taken a very reasoned ethical approach. What I still don’t understand is why a way to appeal is even necessary – the person being accused of being underage wasn’t, they had age verified through Linden’s service, so in order to prove their age they now have to – what? Fax in the same information they provided through the supposedly stellar age verification system?
You do point to another issue, which is the reporting system itself, how the wrongly innocent are punished and, if wrongly punished the accuser does not face a consequence. There are no options for speedy arbitration. As more and more people are able to ascribe real economic consequences to their ability to be in SL, it strikes me as dangerous that Linden can stop access based on what could prove to be false accusations.
If that happened to me and my inability to access SL meant that I was unable to demo the grid to a potential client or couldn’t take care of in world business, I’d be seriously looking at copying my sims and moving them to another platform (and hey, that’s easier and easier to do these days).
[...] Metaverse discusses the absurdity of Linden Lab’s age verification policy in his post, Linden’s Age Verification Hypocrisy. While Writer is mostly criticizing the 3rd-party solution LL began to Beta-test in December 2007, [...]
hehe yeah i saw your main point. The hypocrisy you pointed out did cause me to giggle a bit. sorry i left the *giggle* out of my responses.
There was a similar observation made at Massively in late December. Aristotle’s age verification not good enough for LL? Thanks for refreshing the intertubes about this important issue.
-Adz
Ahhhh thanks for the link to Massively. Had missed that one, and they make the same point only more concisely. Which is my cue to giggle.
Well, I think the way they quietly dropped further implementation when it turned out the AV system did not work for most of the world (that is, outside of the US) made it amply clear that this was little more than a half baked PR / corporate butt protection exercise. As to the AR system, it reeks of incompetence, wilfulness, and sometimes misuse of power — but that is another matter entirely…
It is really nuts. I age verified as soon as I could to avoid exactly those problems of some griefing idiot AR’ing me with all the follow up trouble of such an action. LL always shoots first and asks questions later, and I was hoping to avoid that. I almost couldn’t believe when I read that their own AV system isn’t enough for them!
The only thing that makes me feel a bit more secure is, that their AV via the 3rd party didn’t work for me anyways, so I verified my age manually, sending them a copy of my ID card. With this being stored inside their OWN system I have a tiny bit of hope that I’m safe. But who knows? We are talking about LL…
The way it is handled now, underage ARs are the ultimate griefing tool.
I already posted to the blog of the affected person. Here’s a slightly modified version:
False UA reporting is a particularly nasty form of anti-kid harassment. What really galls me is that LL just takes the false UA report at face value, suspends without warning (generally right before the weekend), and then takes its jolly good time un-suspending. LL provides no info about your false accuser, and presumably, take no action against the harassers.
That this account was already age verified is really the icing on the cake.
How should LL change?
First of all, take their heads out of the sand. I understand their paranoia about RL underagers getting into SL, and places where they shouldn’t be … but LL should realize that certain nasty people are gaming LL’s paranoia. This is (in many known cases) clearly serious *harassment*, not to mention a waste of LL’s time and resources.
If LL receives an UA report, it should (1) if age verification has been completed, assume the UA report is false unless there is some compelling reason to believe otherwise; (2) as a rule, provide a notice with (say) one week to provide age verification *before* suspending; and (3) investigate people who file (say) three or more UA reports which prove to be false.
In this case, LL suspended the account without warning, then took almost a week to unfreeze it. In another case I remember, it took LL about two weeks to unfreeze the person *after* he faxed his driver’s license and stuff.
It is worth adding that where the person has an SL business (as was the case here), the griefer also causes economic loss.
p.s. Btw, the age verification system sucks. I couldn’t get it to auto-verify against my driver’s license, passport, or social security number – and I am even a U.S. citizen well over 18. I hate to think how it works (or doesn’t work) for other countries.
*grrrrr*