The official Linden Lab blog confirmed today the imminent implementation of an identity verification process for the virtual world of Second Life. While residents aren't forced to undergo the process, those who don't will be prevented from entering areas marked as 'restricted'. Estate owners are strongly encouraged to mark down "any content that is explicitly sexual or excessively violent in nature" as restricted.
What information will they be asking for? In addition to your name, age, address, and phone number, a cross-check against government databases will be required. "Exact documents may vary depending on your country of residence, but may include: passport, driver’s license, national ID number or social security number."
The new system is called "Identity Verification (IDV)", a shift away from the old use of the term "age verification". The shift is significant, as the focus now is in finding out who its users are, rather than whether or not it's ok to let them in. None of this information will be stored by Linden Lab, but no such assurances have been given about what the service provider will do with your personal details once they have them.
The service provider is Integrity, a subsidiary of Aristotle, a data-mining agency in the business of helping people run political campaigns. Users will have to trust that they won't ever use their personal details for anything that disagrees with their personal politics.
The only client Integrity has had so far is Bud.TV, who after dealing with much controversy, eventually dropped them (see previous Metaversed article for full story). First 23 attorneys general accused Bud.TV of using Integrity's systems specifically because they were too easily circumvented. Then, Bud.TV saw tens of thousands of legitimate users fail to make it through the system. The site was becoming a colossal failure, and the CEO was quoted as saying: "I can’t even figure out how to get into the website.”
Apparently Linden Lab feels they know better, and that people will love this process so much that they may be willing to pay for it. "Verification will initially be free; as we roll out the system we expect there to be a nominal fee for Premium members, and a larger fee for people with Basic memberships."
Well, as long as it is not mandatory, I will not give them any data. If it become mandatory, I'll leave....
But I do respect the need of some people to verify themselves and their (business, sexual, anyother) partners. Though, that system is very non-secure, and tehre are, as always, some things that need to be clarified http://metaverse.acidzen.org/2007/identity-verification-has-come ....
Maing thing will be, what will community find as "restricted" ie. which clubs and other public places will have to be flaged? I don't expect Lindens to make a list of do's and donts, if residents make this world then they make standards too http://metaverse.acidzen.org/2007/user-generated-censorship
It is just question if we are going to have idiots whose fun in SL will be to check clubs for naked asses, as we had idiots who had nothing clever to talk (when voice came) than to call names non-voice users.
Et tu, LL?
To me the key part is this:
"Land owners are strongly encouraged to flag adult content as Restricted to safeguard themselves from publishing inappropriate content to minors..."
I guess it all hinges on the definition of "adult" and whether "strongly encouraged" morphs into "required".
Somehow I doubt that all those people browsing pr0n on the Internet are providing their passport/SSN/DL numbers to The Authorities. IMO as long as this policy remains voluntary it will be mostly ignored and as such whatever CYA qualities it might have for Linden Lab are minimal. But if they make it mandatory, especially in light of the tepid outsourced privacy assurances, they will lose some residents. Maybe a lot.
In its current form this policy has way too much authoritarian potential for my taste, and will likely affect not just aficionados of "adult" content but the rest of us SL residents as well. And it's nice that we will eventually be able pay for the 'privilege', thanks for that.
At this time LL may not really be a "common carrier", so I can understand liability concerns. And some form of reputation is necessary to sustain the in-world social and economic systems. But as described this identity verification policy could be a disaster all around.
1997: Ooh that scary porn-filled Internet!
2007: Ooh that scary porn/terrorist-filled Metaverse!
Well, it will probably be an easy process, just a few clicks...
And then probably a technical failure rate, who will handle them? Linden Consierge?
And then a cultural failure rate, since there will appear situations Integrity have not anticipated.
And then occasional glitches.. etc, etc.
I take it Integrity will handle those questions. If that is in the contract. Sometimes you forget such a tiny detail.
If LL, will they handle it with same expediency as in Enktan Gully's case?
(http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2007/08/our-heros-are-d.html)
Well, I have yet to feel too concerned, other than on some kind of principal basis. I doubt there will be too many flagged parcels in Caledon. And I have little interest in visiting any flagged clubs in Blingtardia with half the audience camping and the rest hunting partners for poseballs...
Caleb, I doubt that Budweiser can be the only client; that can't be possible. And no doubt they learned from the Budweiser experience and have it tweaked now -- I guess I'm getting tired of the blogging of this meme, and I'd like a reporter -- a blogger, even -- to go talk directly to the company, raise the concerns, and hear what they say.
It seems to me that what they are doing is checking against pre-existing public data bases, which are relatively easy to make up and access. They already exist. Voter lists and lists of people with drivers' licenses already exist. You're already on them, or you wouldn't be able to drive or vote. The issue then becomes -- who gets to access them, and once they do, what do they do with the data? Do we have anything other than a news story years old about somebody accessing these voting lists? Can we point to any really hard data about abuse? I don't see it.
I went through twice on two accounts. The first time I made a simple mistake with the state and it didn't go through format-wise, and gave me an error. I redid it. On another account, I deliberately switched the SS# to see if it would still go through. It did. So it's probably caching entries and verifying them on some kind of percentage basis or something, who the hell knows, and it may error out later? Or never?
I'm all for asking the hard questions about this, I'm just not for re-treading Internet memes.
>To me the key part is this:
>"Land owners are strongly encouraged to flag adult content as Restricted to safeguard >themselves from publishing inappropriate content to minors..."
Well, yes, but I think it is key for a very different reason. It means that LL absolves themselves of any liability for publishing inappropriate content to minors at all.
Where Ben Noble/Duranski when we need him? :) Oh, he's on virtuallyblind commenting on how nice it will be to have confirmed identity for his business partners, but perhaps he missed this bit? I'll go over there and ask his opinion...;)
Shava
Funny, I was just posting a response on VB on this very point when Shava alerted me to this thread. I'm, personally, glad to be able to prove who I am, but that's a different issue than the age verification issue.
I'm not at all convinced that this age verification plan absolves Linden Lab of liability. What is going to happen is that they're going to get parcels reported as mis-flagged. Some owner will refuse to play ball, and they'll delete the content. Once they do that, there is a very good argument that they lose their immunity under the Communications Decency Act because they are "editing user content." The case that will come into play here is called "Fair Housing Council of San Fernando Valley v. Roommate.com" and there's a good writeup of it here (pdf):
http://www.fenwick.com/docstore/Publications/Litigation/Litigation_Alert...
Benjamin,
Of course age verification absolves Linden Lab of liability. Just as it does web sites when they flag "18 or over". You're forgetting that Linden Lab has excellent lawyers, in real life, totally motivated to represent their client, with the best legal resources they can tap if they need to. Of course they're familiar wit "Fair Housing Council" but it's absurd to think it applies.
The TOS enables LL to delete content "for any reason or no reason." "Fair Housing" doesn't hinge on a TOS. RL housing law comes into play here; it's not a game/world.
Your continual efforts to prosecute Linden Lab and Second Life will be in vain.
I don't really know, but here is my guess at all this. I think that they are doing this mostly to enable the ability for people to "adhere to their own local regulations" which they talked about before.
With this, they can try to put the burden of verification and such on the content providers (landowners) and try to remove that responsibility from themselves. I also think they did it to enable some resemblance of "trust" in the virtual world. We don't have a Verisign here yet and I think this is the first shot at getting something like that
I think what Ben was posting that article for is that it has references to define the fine line between "information content provider" and and "Internet Service Provider".
I'm not sure why LL would want to be on the "information content provider" side, but they may already have fallen into that trap with the casino stuff.
What "liability" are you talking about, Prokofy? Getting sued by a parent who is upset that their kid saw something on SL? Under what legal principle? Age verification can't possibly absolve Linden Lab of civil and criminal liability for material that violates the CDA under Section 230 -- that's the whole point here, if they're editing user content (which you've got to agree is the endgame in the parcel flagging system) they can get in trouble for any obscenity they miss whether they're verifying age or not. At least that's the roommate.com theory - it's a new case, and nobody really knows how it'll hold up in the long run.
I have to assume readers realize that I have no interest at all in seeing Linden Lab, or any other virtual world provider, fail. I just analyze the legal stuff as I see it. I think this decision is 90% good. It's 10% bad on the narrow legal question of potential liability under the CDA.
Web porn sites attempt (usually successfully) to dump liability back to the minor and their guardians. If a minor lies to their guardians, they can access a web porn site. If the minor goes the next step and lies to gain entry to the site, the site can say their hands are clean because the individual lied in their agreement for entry.
Equivalently, to be a minor on the adult grid of SL requires lying to the guardian, (and used to involve using their credit card), and lying when going through the TOS.
Porn is one-way, however. VW experience is two-way. It is give and take between people, so there are other private individuals that must be lied to by the endangered minor as well. There is the landowner that puts up a warning, and there is the person who will participate consensually with that minor in simulated intimacy (or else they would report the minor). Putting aside obvious things like child porn rings showing real pictures of minors to others, the simulated intimacies of SL must always be consensual with private individuals present.
So LL is threatens loss of our money, property, emotional fulfillment and time because someone (not necessarily a guardian, but some third party monitor) observes consensual simulated intimacy occuring that they consider too extreme for a minor that may or may never successfully lie at so many levels I order to participate in it.
Does this make owning and displaying a poseball illegal to possess because of its potential to be used to harm a minor who uses it consensually with someone they lie to? Is the entire frabric of a virtual world impossible to separate from the real to such an extent that it must be considered too legally risky for people to create?
To create a virtual environment that has simulated human intimacies, we are now forced to create nested legal agreements that cover all interactions with other members of the world from the LL level right down to every single individual consensual participant. Apparently even that is not enough.
Where is the logic?
So, to get into the adult grid and access mature/restricted areas one needs to turn RL ID into some shady third party company in order to protect "innocent" minors who lied about their age in first place, but if any pervert adult wants to get into the teen grid, where the real innocent underage are, then he is completely free to do so and anonymously?
Can somebody explain?
Benjamin, as you must know, a French "moral majority" type of organization already tried to name Second Life in a suit, and failed. I quite understand the principle of "Fair Housing" but it doesn't apply here, unless you extend it out irrationally. I'm not at all sure that removal of content because the adult flag is checked off will rise to the test of "editing" -- it's not discretionary so much as it is a natural consequence of failing to comply with the flagging requirement. If they awarded "M" or "PG" status on the basis of a discretionary review *first* by committee of each piece of content, like the motion pictures industry, arguably that might be called "editing". But they don't. They allow people to make their own judgement, and stay uninvolved in the decision-making about status. And if a TOS says they can remove for "any reason or no reason," that's not editing, either.
Just because law applies, doesn't mean it *will be* applied. That doesn't mean it's not being enforced; in fact, LL, by creating an age verification regimen is doing the due diligence it needs to do under the law.
"Fair Housing" can apply abstractly, but who is going to attempt to try to apply its principles in *this* case? The motivation of actual RL housing discrimination against, say, gays in "Fair Housing" is what prompted the effort to try to get a reading on how much responsibility ISPs have for content (and the judges were divided as is known).
If no RL offense like housing discrimination pertains, and it's only a question of Little Johnny being exposed to something he shouldn't have seen, how much motivation can there be? It's still a membership organization -- a private club, even if open to the public -- and it says on the can that you must be 18 -- or head to the Teen Grid. This is backed up further with PG and M zones and even now age verification. I hardly think they it seems to me that there isn't any 10 percent liability under CDA, even, because this pertains only if you abstractly and zealously apply "Fair Housing" -- which no one is going to rationally attempt.
If you are not interested in seeing LL fail, you shouldn't be applying law abstractly, as in Ginko's, where you indict LL in advance, even though they have no relationship to these resident-made banks, and in age-verification, where they merely require voluntarily compliance with their own designation of "M".
Kryss - Huh. That's a really good point. There's not much logic at all to the idea that you have to jump through flaming hoops to get to look at naughty pictures on the adult grid but an adult can log on to the teen grid with a clipboard and a smile. I can't argue with that. It's not like they're requiring parents to verify *their* ID and then state that their minor children are free to play on the teen grid. You're completely right here. Me? I wish that voluntary ID verification was divorced from age verification, because voluntary ID verification is great, and age verification looks like poorly implemented overkill.
Prokofy - We're not on the same exact page, but we're in the same hymnal here. I cant agree that my analysis is an *irrational* extension of the roommate/fair housing case, but I do agree that it pushes up to the edge of the decision, and like I said, it's a new decision. I try to keep this stuff in perspective; I've always said I don't know how it would play out even though there's a very good *argument* that it would apply this way. Also, you're right that it'd take a pretty zealous prosecutor to pursue it. (And that's not me -- I'm a defense guy).
As for applying law abstractly, I don't want to get too far off topic, but I've simply never said that Linden Lab was violating any statutes at all re: financial frauds in SL or in regard to age verification. At the very end of the mess with Ginko, I encouraged people who had gotten burned to file ARs, and I said that I'd anticipate a lawyer who tried to sue over this naming Linden Lab and Rosedale in the suit, based on their policy of non-intervention and Rosedale's favorable comments back last fall about it.
What I think a lawyer will do -- or even what I would do myself if I was zealously representing people who lost money here -- isn't necessarily what is good for Second Life, and it's not necessarily what I want to see happen, personally. My position is that we -- the Second Life community -- are either going to need to step up and demand better from financial institutions, or else we're going to get it rammed down our throats via regulation. I'm in favor of the former, but I'm realistic about the latter. ID verification actually helps move us toward the former, and that's another good thing about it. Again, I'm not condemning LL for this at all, I think it's 90% a good call with a 10% drawback. I think I fly my Linden Lab fanboy colors pretty clearly here, to be honest, and I've caught some crap for my *support* of the policy over this:
http://virtuallyblind.com/2007/08/29/identity-verification-business-seco...
You know, this is a good chance to point out that I wear several hats here. As a user of virtual worlds, who is in Second Life about 70% of my virtual world time, I'm an unapologetic fan of SL and Linden Lab. As a guy who writes on this stuff, I try to keep that out of it, and so I sometimes point out problems with Linden Lab and sometimes defend what they're doing (same with other worlds and games). And as a lawyer by training, I'm likely to pick at the tiny crap and interpret things at their edges. That's annoying, I'm sure, but hey... I'm a lawyer, people can see it coming.
Benjamin,
I agree with you, voluntary ID verification is great.... when it is done properly. That means using retinal scan, iris recognition or finger prints. To believe an obscure company, which coincidentally also sells the same kind of information they gather with this "ID verification system", is going to provide reliable identification doesn't seem very prudent.
We'll see how it works out. I'm not convinced either way yet. I've seen a lot of vague accusations of incompetence, but nothing concrete. I posted a challenge over here: age verify my dog.
http://www.gridgrind.com/?p=179#comments
I'd love to see some hard data either way. I figure they'll get it ironed out in the long term, but if it really doesn't work at all in the short term, people should know that.
As for retinal scans and all that, I don't see why that's necessary. This won't be foolproof, but it's not designed to be. It's just designed to be good enough. I've thousands of dollars in purchases online without verifiy my retinal pattern. Why should this be different?
Kryss:
Yes, that is true verification. Not that I won't give that to Aristotle, Linden Lab or anybody similar, I will protest on the streets when my government ask me for that.
Good enough for what?
If the objective is to keep minors from accessing restricted content, then, the "id verification" as proposed by LL and Integirty clearly is not good enough.
Not saying that LL should use retinal scans or similar. By all means, in this case, I believe CC and "I'm over 18.." checkbox more than suffice. But then, I ask you, Benjamin, in the hipotetical situation where a minor who inputed dad's CC and checked the over 18, goes into a mature area and his parents discover it: could they hold LL accountable? What if the minor had stolen dad's ID number instead, does that alter the liability?
I often shop on-line too, and I never had to give any ID to the merchant. Just my CC, name and address. This shouldn't be any different.
Agree with Kryss, I think the the whole idea of IDV is waaaaay over the top of what's probably actually necessary...
Benjamin, Philip did not endorse Ginko specifically. He made positive comments in general about encouraging residents to find solutions to the need for credit in innovative ways. LL has stayed hands off from these banks all along, and I don't see how they can be roped in now as responsible given that track record.
I totally disagree that we have to posit draconian prosecutorial scenarios as you are indicating and then be frog-marched from there into accepting some onerous inworld variant of regulation. Regulation exists in RL. In all this time, no authority has acted. They might. But I'd rather have an authority from an elected and accountable RL government with some kind of checks and balances than a secretive, unaccountable group of anonymous (or even not-anonymous) avatar who think they are just "better" and "experts" and "can save us from RL regulators". Their "apres moi le deluge" argumentation is hardly persuasive.
I don't see RL authorities ramming. I see avatars ramming.
Philip's comments back in October look pretty Ginko-specific to me. At minimum, they were in the context of a piece entirely about GInko for Reuters, and they referred to the self-styled bank directly. Here's the link.
http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2006/10/15/ginko-financial-pioneer...
It was his recent comments, though, made that really made me think it was likely LL would get named in a suit, if one occurred:
http://www.your2ndplace.com/node/358
I'm not advocating it, nor do I necessarily think it would be a great suit -- but given these comments, and the fact that Linden Lab would be a more attractive target than Ginko's owners, I'd expect it to be named if a lawsuit takes shape.