mrtopf.de

The answer to all your questions, Tao, is very simple: the purpose of age verification is to limit the liability from litigation, first for Linden Lab, second for landowners with adult content. It is to limit the exposure to litigation from any party, or any legal probe by any real-life prosecutor or judge concerned about violation of the law especially regarding child pornography, but other areas of adult content may be at issue depending on the locality.

By verifying your age, YOU are verifying your age. You are not doing anything *but* verifying your age and proving that you are an adult who can verify their age and add to that a real-life address and mark off adult material as adults-only. What is verified, again, is *you*. You aren’t swearing to keep out minors — that is a correllary of what you are doing. Rather, you are accepting accountability yourself.

You can’t perfectly keep out minors. So no need to comment-fisk and word-parse and literalize it all to death, imagining teenagers everywhere robbing their mom’s driver’s license out of her purse and using it on SL. Because if it is discovered, then it becomes a) not a problem for Linden Lab, which has a verification and adults-only flag firmly in place b) not a problem for the land owner who has verified himself as an adult with verified identification and has made a good-faith effort to prevent kids from entering.

Try to keep your eye on the ball here, Tao, and not get lost in defiant distractions. This constant theoretical fisking and parsing of the kid with the mom’s driver’s license is beside the point. The point is to prevent pedophiles from setting up shop in SL and harming kids, by a) making adults accountable by providing their ID and b) making them swear that they make a good-faith effort to keep out minors to the best of their ability.

Why is this so hard to grasp? If someone gets fake verification, they get fake verification. Their problem. But the landowner has made a good-faith effort.

I suspect one of the reasons why there is so much anger about this coming from Europeans, aside from the knee-jerk hate stuff against Americans who they imagine invade privacy and keep records of porn accessors that they feed to the Bush security state blah blah, is that they come from legal systems with a different concept. It’s the difference between civil law and common law.

In civil law, you attempt to foresee and define every single thing you can about an offense or a right, and make very detailed descriptive and prescriptive language in the law. You try for 100 percent and try to foresee every possible outcome — what if someone cams in? what if they have a fake ID? what if they steal from their mom’s purse? If this, then that. What if this happens — then do that. That’s why in some countries a press law can be two tomes large.

In common law, you start from a different premise. Whatever is not forbidden is allowed. You go for a broader concept, and rather than make restrictive clauses for every single instance, you make simple statements: “no one under 18 is allowed, you must verify your age”. There isn’t any press law in America, for example; there is merely one line called “The First Amendment” saying “Congress shall make no law…” — putting a restriction on the state, rather than on the press…

It’s a very different style and outlook and it can be exasperating for either culture to deal with the other.

Linden Lab and Integrity are not going to perfectly exclude all minors from SL. They are not going to perfectly stop fraud. They are not going to cover every twisted case of every kid who steals a driver’s license or writes in “Tupac.” But they will make a broad effort in good faith to keep out kids in principle, and more importantly, verify adults and make them accountable, should an incident occur.

As Michael Linden explained it in crystal-clear terms:

“Michael Linden: “As has always been the case, Residents are morally, socially and legally responsible for their actions and content in Second Life. Clearly, any illegal activity or content will be investigated and appropriate action will be taken.”

[...]

Michael Linden: One effect I can sort of allude to: if someone says “Bob has nasty stuff on his land,” Bob can say “It’s on a mature region, on a parcel flagged as mature content; I’m as sure as anything can be on the internet that minors aren’t accessing this content.”

And following this logic, if someone says, “Bob has something nasty on his lawn AND we know a kid with their mom’s driver’s license is on his lawn,” then we can say, “Bob is in a mature region, with his parcel flagged, and himself verified, and he’s as sure as anything can be on the Internet that minors aren’t accessing this content.”

If they do, then careless mom will have to start taking the rap, as the other adults in the equation did their jobs.

Therefore, once you get this framed clearly in your mind, you stop fussing and fuming and parsing about some kid camming in to see something they shouldn’t see. You seem to fail to grasp the idea of “good faith effort” and “as good as it gets on the Internet” and “limiting liability”.

Rather than dreaming up exceptions, look at where the center of gravity is: the person with that content has verified themselves and flagged their land. The rest is not their business.

by Prokofy Neva on 11.12.2007 at 00:27. Reply #

Well you can ignore the trust issue, the system is so easy to defraud that it's almost fraudulent to claim that this will increase trust.

The issue is LL protecting themselves by using a company who take responsibility for verifiying the age of people. As Prok said, it's making an effort. If LL had actually sold the process this way then there would be a lot less criticism of the system, but they tried to put spin on it by banging the trust drum and that has led to people ripping holes in the process.

The basic information needed is name, address and date of birth, in some countries it's also phone number but you can't enter that in the LL form for some reason.

The additional information, which Integrity only suggest, is causing the hoo-ha. People are quite rightly questioning how Integrity can verifiy information when government bodies suggest Integrity aren't an official partner, there's a wider issue with that than the SL verification process.

Robin has clearly stated this is a beta process, she's working hard to get that message across but people are at the castle gates with the pitchforks, with some rather disgracefully calling for her head. People should be careful what they wish for, Robin Linden is a great person to have onboard.

The main aim is to put a process in place that says, "Hey we made it clear, very clear, that you need to be over 18 to be here. We restricted access by requesting information, not just a tick box and people got around by lying not just once, but by lying about their name, address, date of birth and illegally using government issued ID to defraud the system."

That sounds a lot better than saying "Well it says 18+ on the entry page".

by Ciaran Laval on 11.12.2007 at 03:04. Reply #

Well, Prok is actually dead on (for once). The whole point of this is making users more directly accountable for their actions.

I for one am in full support of this, as annonymity has proven to be far too emboldening in this world. I realize this makes me somewhat a pariah in the eyes of everyone who is against it, but I can find no legitimate way to justify asking them to not do it. It is their game, it is their platform, it is their livelihood, and like it or not, their responsibility to keep the system on the square side of legality.

Personally, I won't honestly care when everyone is a little more out in the open. They delete your credentials after you're flagged verified, and frankly, the onrez viewer likely does more data mining than this verification process (would certainly account for its overamped bandwidth consumption as opposed to the standard viewer). Perhaps it will make people think a little harder about how they behave and cause them to think twice about putting into writing things they would never say sans the shield of 'privacy.'

by Kailie Quinn on 11.12.2007 at 04:36. Reply #

If a scheme like this gives any legal protection that layers are the most stupid persons that ever entered the world. Even worse than politicians, Well i just got age verified as Tupac, you know the rap artist that was killed in 1996… I have to make something up as this scheme doesn't take any Swedish information.

If this is ok as doing there best *giggle* The sign on the frontpage saying just for 18+ is as good. Both works as a magnet for kids.

How can it be a good faith attempt when the start test shows 80% wrong in a small simple sample and much much worse in the big populations. How can anyone believe in something this bad, how can an attempt doing this with this records count. If anything trying this and continuing with whit it show SHOULD make them liable. The looked at the technology found out it could not work and used it… The problem is that NOW people will actually start to believe they don't have to look out, thet will belive that the number of kid that are a round and age verified are few, I guess that there are a bigger % of kids age verified than there are among them that isn't age verified. The only reason there is to age verify is to prove that you ain't the kid you are.

by Nadine Nozaki on 11.12.2007 at 22:57. Reply #