Linden Lab Do An Age Verification U-Turn

One thing that is driving me nuts about Linden Lab is that I get more information on what’s happening from Cristiano Midnight’s SLUniverse than I do from the official site. Now in some cases there are mitigating circumstances, such as the rumoured new profiles issue, they aren’t ready for an announcement or they never will be I guess. However for things like the new age verification policy? Why on earth am I finding out about this via a thread on SLUniverse?

Tateru Nino has also covered the new age verification process, rather than seeing an announcement from Linden Lab. Linden Lab are also not the best at marketing, they never have been but to improve matters on these fronts Linden Lab should just bloody well go and make Robin Harper an offer she can’t refuse (and I don’t mean a horse’s head in her bed) and drag Catherine Linden back kicking and screaming too! Communication is key.

Anyway back to the point of this blog post, the new age verification process and it couldn’t be much easier, you simply enter your date of birth and promise to be telling the truth.

Easy peasy huh? I tested this with my alts, well I first of all made some schoolboy errors and found my alts could enter parcels whether they were age verified or not, at which point I realised they were group owners or estate managers, the first rule about testing club is to have a good test case! Anyway eventually I age verified one alt with the new process, logged out and back in and voila! That alt could now enter age verified restricted parcels and sims.

Now I’m sure there are some raised eyebrows about this, throughout the adult content debacle Linden Lab made many an excuse as to why this wasn’t suitable, to be honest, it’s not suitable but it does appear to meet minimum requirements and many an adult website allows people in just because they tick a box to say they are an adult. However ideally there would be a better solution. The funny part is that when adult segregation was first announced a lot of people said there was no need for verification because people had already agreed that they were eighteen or over when creating their accounts, Linden Lab finally seem to agree.

One does have to wonder if Linden Lab have termnated their deal with Aristotle,  there were fees involved for Linden Lab and when this was first pushed out and tested by concierge customers there was talk of that fee needing to be paid by the residents who wanted to be verified, that of course never happened.

I will be happy if Aristotle are out of the picture, when this was in concierge beta they were asking for details such as UK passport numbers, I asked the UK passport agency how on earth Aristotle could verify such info and they informed me that the can’t, but there are certain characteristics in a passport number that can be verified, such as certain numbers indicating which country has issued the passport, but that right away made me suspicious of Aristotle, this may be unfair but it did make me suspicious, so I won’t be disappointed if they are no longer around but I am a tad concerned just how easy it is to verify.

I know people will get around verification systems, but at least people needed to make more of an effort before, maybe Linden Lab have decided that getting criticised for having adult content when they take more measures than most adult websites isn’t worth the hassle. After all I can recall a report on adult content in virtual worlds that more or less gave red light centre a free pass because it was aimed at adults!

However now we’re more or less back to square one with adult content, people can easily access it, people can easily lie to access it too but for those who were reluctant to part with personal information to third parties, this could be good and it could help to increase reach for adult merchants.

However part of me is uneasy about this, it should be remembered that merchants such as Stroker Serpentine had long ago, long before Zindra, asked Linden Lab for increased restrictions on whom could access adult content, what we have now is an easy to fool solution, hopefully nothing bad comes of this but as we’ve seen any solution can be fooled and when the restrictions are too tight, they cause as many problems as they solve.

We’ll see how this pans out and I’ll keep an eye on the wiki for the adult content user group meetings, there’s no point me wasting an hour of my life going there when I’m erased from the minutes so I’ll just read the minutes instead of having any input get ignored at the meeting, I don’t have enough time to do all the things I want as it is, I sure as hell won’t waste my time somewhere I get ignored.