High Fidelity And Identity In The Metaverse

I’ve had a lot of trouble and Strife (Onizuka) putting this post together. Haiku and LSL aren’t my thing and I need to have my wits about me today, so I’m staying on safer ground. So from a post from yesterday, Philip Rosedale has added an interesting blog post regarding how identity may work in High Fidelity : Identity in the Metaverse.

In the post Philip talks of how we don’t generally have name tags above our head or on our person when out and about. I mean some wear them at work, but it’s not a permanent identifier. We exchange names when we need to or are ready to. This is basic human instinct at play here, something social networks seem to be trying to consign to the dustbin of history, but instinct is on our side.

However at times we need to not only provide our name, we need to prove it too. I’ve had to take my Passport to the bank to open a new account, I also had to take my passport to work, even though I’d been working there for many moons. However I only provide the additional information when it’s absolutely required, we don’t carry our passports around with us and show them to strangers just to create trust. The exchange of trust comes in many forms, some more official than others.

Now you may be wondering what any of this has to do with High Fidelity. High Fidelity it seems is not going to be a walled garden, there will be other operators and when you visit their worlds, there will be different ID requirements. One of the concerns with OpneSim has always been about the operators. However this goes both ways and operators will therefore want to make their decisions about who they let in and what level of trust they require, Philip explains this with a brief overview in the blog post :

A ‘metaverse’ of connected internet servers run by different people and containing different parts of the virtual world poses an additional challenge: Not only do you need to have the choice when and to whom to disclose parts of your identity, you also cannot always trust the particular server you are ‘inside’ with different aspects of your identity. This is similar to visiting a new website and being unwilling to give credit card information, or unwilling to login using Twitter or Facebook, until you understand and trust the site.

Our design with High Fidelity is the one that seems like the best solution to meet these goals: Operators of different virtual world servers (we call these ‘domains’) can decide on the level of identity security with which they wish to challenge people arriving at their locations. This can range from nothing (meaning that disclosure of identity information is totally up to you), to a requirement akin to cookies on websites (I want a token that I can use to identify you the next time you login here, but I don’t need to know who you really are), or finally a request for unambiguous identity infomation (I want to know your real name to allow you to login here).

I’ve bolded those parts because Philip bolded them in his post! However obviously you need somebody to trust in the first place to run an identity system such as this and High Fidelity will be offering that service.

Philip explains this, again with a brief overview, in the blog post :

To make this possible, High Fidelity will run a global service that lets you optionally store and validate identity information (such as your true RL name, a unique avatar name, or proof of connection to other identity services like Twitter or Facebook), and then also lets you selectively show this information to other people in the virtual world, regardless of which location/server you are currently in. You won’t have to use it, but it will hopefully be useful for many people, and will be one of the ways that we will be able to make money as a business.

These are important concepts and should help both operators and users to make decisions on how much they trust the inter-connected worlds they visit. However it certainly requires further discussion and Philip indicates in the blog post that thoughts are welcome.

Obviously the devil will be in the detail but an identity service such as this could well be a major boost. When it comes to paid services and transactions, identity becomes more of an issue than it is for say, roleplaying an Elf … well Elves should be treated with caution, but you get my drift. There are different circumstances regarding levels of trust, just as there are in the real world.

This is an interesting area of debate, getting it right is important and High Fidelity are certainly making the right noises.

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