Ok, here it is. Official blog post by Robin Linden is nice, polite and sounds reasonable. More than we expected. In short:
- You can verify your name, age, sex and/or location.
- You are not obliged to.
- It is done via third party called Aristotle Integrity.
- Land owners are strongly encouraged to flag their parcels as restricted if they contain non-PG content.
- It's been expected that community will take care about land-owners who "forgot" to flag their restricted content.
What remains unclear is…
Are data kept after verification or not? From the official blog post:
Information provided during the identification process, such as a driver’s license, passport or national ID card number, will simply be used to cross-check against public records. Linden Lab will not be storing this data and nor will the third party verification specialist, Aristotle.
And then, just few paragraphs later:
Linden Lab does not share Resident data for marketing or other purposes, but does of course comply with requests from all governmental and regulatory authorities and with court orders including subpoenas.
Wait! What will they share with authorities if they store nothing? Though I am not against handling criminals to the police, this two quotes hardly go together.
What content is restricted?
We trust that common sense will prevail. As a general rule, “Restricted Content” is any content that is explicitly sexual or excessively violent in nature.
I would also be happy to trust in prevalence of common sense, but as we saw recently, it is hard to believe this is going to work. Simply, world is too big and many different viewpoints coexist there. On one hand, that is beautiful and makes second life very interesting, vibrant and rich community. Beside that, residents are adults who should be responsible for the world they are developing. On the other, can we trust into existence of common sense in such environment? Will we all behave like tolerant adults and avoid participation in witch hunts?
Except these few things everything seems fine. Verification is not mandatory so one can stay (partly) anonymous if wish so, or can have a layer of security for business purposes. I don't believe that adult things that stay fairly private will be hunted for. Once again, second life is a big and diverse community and there shall the room for different lifestyles, and different approaches to the metaverse.
But as Robin nicely opened her introduction of Identity Verification (IDV):
Trust is the foundation of any community.
Problem is, how to trust Linden Lab they will handle that precious data with care and respect with all those inventories disappearing? And how to trust them with all the uncleanness we read every time something like this is happening?
According to poll at Metaversed,majority of residents will verify their identity (84% at this moment, but it is still small number of votes). What about you? Will you, or not, or you are damn pissed because of it? Why?
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