Linden Lab Introduce Tilia To a Confused Audience

Back in November 2015, Inara Pey blogged; Linden Lab and Tilia Inc. – Speculations On The Lab’s New Subsidiary. The long and short of this post was that Inara Pey and Vick Forcella had been speculating about a new subsidiary of Linden Lab, Tilia Inc.

Inara asked Linden Lab some questions and Peter Gray, who at the time was Linden Lab’s director of Global Communications, told Inara :

Tilia is a subsidiary of Linden Lab, focused on payments and the compliance work associated with operating virtual economies, and it will provide services for both Second Life and Project Sansar.

Inara’s post went into a little more speculation about the purpose of Tilia, but with notable exceptions such as Inara, most of us forgot all bout Tilia Inc. until yesterday, around three and a half years later, when Linden Lab blogged; Important Changes to your Second Life Account – Introducing Tilia.

Linden Lab’s introduction to Tilia, has, it’s fair to say, caused much confusion, a fair degree of bafflement and some disappointment, as this forum thread exemplifies.

The cause of the confusion is a combination of people not expecting such changes, a misunderstanding of what the changes mean, frustration over the changes, an initial blog post that understandably can’t anticipate every question and the bog standard issue of a TOS that is far too long.

The gist of the blog post is that Second Life residents will be required to also have Tilia accounts for participating in Second Life from August 1st. A Second Life resident’s Tilia account will be responsible for managing a resident’s US Dollar account activities.

On top of that, if you are processing credit, that means withdrawing US dollars from Second Life to say, Paypal, then there are additional identity requirements, as the blog post explains :

In order to stay in compliance with regulatory requirements, if you wish to process a credit, we will need certain personal information to verify your identity, including your name, address, date of birth, and social security number (or government-issued identification if you are not a U.S. Citizen).

Many Second Life resident’s will have already provided this information, you may, or may not, be required to provide them again. According to Linden Lab, many people won’t be required to provide these details again.

Why Linden Lab are doing this is explained in the blog post :

As registered money services businesses, Linden Lab and Tilia are required to comply with applicable U.S. laws and regulations. As part of our ongoing risk management process, we must obtain, verify, and record information about our customers for whom we offer financial-related services.

So in other words, for Linden Lab to continue to be able to allow people to cash out or process payments, they have to ensure they are compliant with regulations.

I can understand that people find these sort of regulations frustrating, but Linden Lab must be compliant to be able to continue to offer these services.

A personal peeve of mine regarding these sort of regulations is that in the 21st century we still have to keep providing information that we have already provided elsewhere. This is not Linden Lab’s fault, but I have verified my Paypal account, I have already had to provide the required information to my bank, why can’t I just have some sort of electronic authorisation that confirms, yes that’s the already verified me, instead of having to scan documents and send them to another company, over and over.

Anyway, the most important thing for concerned residents to do is to read Linden Lab’s blog post, read the linked forum post answers and if you really have time, read the forum thread in its entirety.