When Robin Linden said that trust is the foundation of any community and announced identity verification in second life, she made me thinking. OK, business people need to know who they are making contracts with. And emotional and sex adventures could also benefit from knowing who are you playing with. At least, some hearts would be settled easy if knowing that they are not messing with the minors. This is not about how minors got to the main grid, if they really did. This is about what does it takes to settle your heart, both in business and in romance.
Easy case first. I am not sure about you, but I don't have to see the RL face of the person I do business with. This is XXI century, and we do many things over the internet. But I won't do anything serious with somebody whose e-mail is joejoe21 at public_mail dot com. At least, things like those are dealing via official e-mail addresses from the domain of the company. On-line business is inventioned long before second life and, thanks for asking, it is doing good. And there is no reason that businesses that are related to second life (whether you build a sim or just having a meeting with your partners there) should not follow established procedures of the flatworld.
Like always, things gets more complicated in that other field. It is not that easy to confirm identity (or some parts of it) of your partner. Not unless you use Aristotle or some other dubious service. And not without risking your and your partner's data finish in databases you don't want to have recorded anything about you.
Emotional engagement, even one night stand in one of metaverse's clubs, is a matter of trust. Whether it is RL gender, being over 18, maybe location or truthfulness of the personal history that has been told… we might want to be positively sure about that. But how? Identity verification can tell you about age and gender, maybe even other data. That is, if you believe that the other person didn't stole parent's or girlfriend's drivers license. Or one can just ignore that possibility keeping consciousness quiet and passing possible guilt before the court of law on the service that did the verification.
I believe I am not the only one who prefer to develop personal feeling of trust over some bureaucratic data-base cross-checking. If a person is over 18 is not so much a biographical data as feeling of the maturity of that person. And then, that is to be checked by other means than "show me your ID before we take our clothes off". Problem with this approach is that it takes a bit more time. It takes a date before going to the skybox. Then again, I know I am not the only one who prefer to date before sex. Information exchanged during the date is important part of sex. It is one part of the foreplay. That is the case in meatspace, but even more in the metaverse where we don't even have the meat and flash.
But we all have our means of getting to know and trust the other side. What are yours? What do you believe those people you meet in the metaverse? What is your way to the truth? What do you want to know about them before getting into contracts and pose balls? And, the last but not the least, how do you get the info you need?
[...] as an answer to the Nipplegate and without knowing about my post. Also, dandellion shows hers here, but since she doesn’t mention the post, I imagine it was only matter of [...]
RL doesn’t necessarily have to enter into it. I accept people for what they present in SL. If I want to know more I ask them. I don’t go and check a “verified” set of data. That is the antithesis of trust.
LL tries to make it all about trust when, really, it’s not about that at all… it’s about covering their legal asses because there might be minors on the grid.
I don’t believe that any company or third part has the right to enter into our relationships on SL. Trust should be established between two people, not between two people and a third party company acting as the “arbiter of the almighty truth.” Robin Linden’s post was absurd.
For more on this see my blog…
Anony Mouse
“To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.” ~ George MacDonald