age verification
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Age-verification - a matter of informed choice
As the fur continues to fly over Second Life's beta age-verification system, one of the aspects that has only really been lightly touched on is informed choice. Before offering your identity documents and personal data to any third-party, there are things you need to know, otherwise you cannot be said to be capable of making an informed choice in the matter. So far, that information hasn't been comprehensively provided to you.
Linden Lab: International age verification failure rate "unacceptable" [updated]
Robin Harper, Linden Lab's Vice President of Marketing and Community Development, has just put out a late update on the status of the new Second Life age verification beta. Harper begins by acknowledging the very high failure rate among international verification attempts, "The failure rate is much higher than we saw in previous testing, and clearly is unacceptable."
Age verification arrives on the Second Life grid (updated)
Age verification is now in beta on the Second Life grid. We think it's called Age Verification, anyway. It's undergone a couple name changes since inception. Initially, Linden Lab were calling it Age Verification, then Identity Verification (IDV) and now we're back to Age Verification again. We're not really very sure if it is going to change its name again. There are a few things, though, that we do know ...
AgeLock: age verification by residents, for residents
I will assume, for the sake of this article, that you know nothing about the age verification issues Second Life has undergone. It's thorny, and Linden Lab's system still isn't in place, despite how gung-ho they were about getting it up and running pretty much post-haste. In the meantime, a group of residents have been quietly working on a homebrew system called AgeLock, and while there's a full description of the way it works on the referring site, the best part of the site's description is this: 'How does this system prevent children from accessing adult content?It doesn't. It won't. It can't. As parents ourselves, we really do care about the importance of protecting children but this is not about protecting children this time. In this instance, our goal is to provide a sense of security for the adult community.'And there you have it, the heart of the matter. There are without a doubt, non-adult residents with accounts on SL. There is no foolproof way to prevent someone who shouldn't be on the Main Grid from nevertheless creating an account for themselves. The AgeLock system at the very least protects an adult sim's owner from liability issues. This is a step in the right direction; whether or not Linden Lab works off of this remains to be seen.(Thanks, Allana!)
