Identity – Ciaran Laval

As part of Second Life’s 13th birthday celebrations an inworld Q&A session called Meet The Lindens takes place. Last night it was the turn of Linden Lab CEO to sit on the couch and answer questions.

SL Newser reporter Bixyl Shuftan reported on the event yesterday and as part of his report he wrote :

Ebbe was then asked if users of Sansar would have the option to chose their own names for their avatars, or would they be having to use real-life identities. Ebbe answered he was leaning to the latter, “I think what’s best for Sansar is real names. … anonymous identities makes things confusing.”

Hamlet Au over at New World Notes picked up on this and blogged : Project Sansar May Require RL Names, Suggests CEO. The comments on Hamlet’s post suggested that many people were not exactly enamoured by this news. Fortunately, Ebbe didn’t say that real names would be required for Project Sansar and this simply seems to have been a matter of crossed wires.

Inara Pey has the posted the full transcript and audio : SL13B: Ebbe on the Lab, Second Life, Sansar and more. Here we can see that Ebbe mentions that Linden Lab have been discussing issues of identity for Project Sansar and that real names are being discussed :

I have a preference, some other team players have slightly different preferences, so we’ll see where it ends up. But I think what would be best for Sansar would be real names, and then the ability to have personas underneath that.

This should not be taken in isolation, reading the full transcript we can see that Ebbe isn’t saying that everyone should have to display real names, but he feels it might be ideal if Linden Lab know your real name and that in certain circumstances you may well be in a setting where real names are a better option :

So I could go into a role-playing, or into an experience as an anonymous user in that context. But to the platform, I am not anonymous. And so, without making that too complicated and confusing, is that the right answer? We’ll see. But I think to, it would certainly help with griefing and other things. And it also supports a lot of interesting use-cases where anonymity is actually just really confusing, and actually gets in the way.

You can think of a lot of professional use-cases where there are teachers and students and professionals having meetings where these anonymous identities makes things really confusing; “I know Bob, I want to talk to Bob. Who the hell is this Jumping Jack guy?”

So we’re still debating this, and I’m pushing in one way, and people are pushing in different ways, and we’ll see where we end up. I mean, unfortunately, to implement real names is also really complicated. Do you hitch a ride with Facebook, or do you have to somehow build your own real name system.

There’s more, a lot more and I urge people to read it in full. If you want to go straight to this part of the transcript go here. The important things to note are that Linden Lab have not yet made a decision but it looks as if they are talking about the possibility of using your real name or a pseudonym depending upon the experience you’re visiting. This is not a new discussion at Linden Lab and has been going on since well before Ebbe Altberg joined the company.

Continue reading “Identity and Name Issues Raise Their Head After Ebbe Altberg Q&A”

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.

Continue reading “High Fidelity And Identity In The Metaverse”