There’s only really so many ways to verify the age of someone that you’ve never seen (actually, it often isn’t all that much easier in person, but that’s another story).
You can treat them as if they’re of-age if they have a credit card, but that’s inaccurate and a violation of credit-card merchant agreements (symptoms include suddenly having to change payment providers).
You can match identification document information against an identification provider like Aristotle-Integrity, but that’s unreliable and fraught with issues, and doesn’t prove that the information describes the applicant.
There must be a simpler way to verify Second Life accounts as adults! Oh, wait…. here it is!
Here’s the latest Second Life age-verification page. It asks you for your date-of-birth (it already has it filled in, if you provided it at any previous time), and asks you to promise that you’re being honest about it.
Now, before you jump up and down about the inadequacy of such measures, I’ll make a mention that this meets the US Federal Trade Commission’s best-practices for age-verification for access to online adult content. That is, the US Government feels that this sort of system is fine.
Well, actually, no – the US Government doesn’t feel that this is fine, however it is the best and most accurate system that it has so far been possible to build, more to the point – that is, nobody’s so far able to effectively improve on it. Everyone’s got deceptively simple ideas on how to do accurate age-verification, most of which are based on false premises. Really, the whole thing falls down as soon as someone pulls out a fake ID.
So, there you go. If you’ve been holding off getting age-verified because you didn’t want to send sensitive identity information to a private foreign firm, now’s your chance to get it done.
@Henri I found Aristotle very open and honest about how they handled verification, and the success rates and so forth when I contacted them in the past. If you’re a potential customer they seem to be very up-front about what you’re getting.
“As for credit cards verification, banks do not *forbid* it, they just don’t (and indeed can’t) *guarantee* it” – I wasn’t talking about banks. I was talking about credit-card companies (VISA, Mastercard, AE, etc). The prohibition is written into their merchant agreements, last I looked.
And France might be an exception. Especially with pre-paid cards, there’s no age-limit. It’s increasingly common for minors to get them to pay for games and goods (online and offline). A parent can just pay their allowance straight into the card. A credit-card with a $0 credit-limit is very handy for many minors, and then they’re not needing to carry cash for most usual things. It’ll buy everything from junk food and metro tickets to MMOG subscriptions and Linden Dollars.
In the USA, you can get a standard credit-card so long as you have a job (even a part-time one), though admittedly not many bother – since the credit limit is usually only about a hundred dollars or so – dependent on the minor’s income and if it has a non-zero credit-limit, that has to be approved by a parent or guardian.
It’s not routine at this time to be offered a card if you’re a minor, but in many countries it’s easy enough to be issued one if you want one. I personally know at least one 12-year-old with a VISA card.
Visa separately cautions: “The issuance of a Visa card is not restricted to individuals above 18 years of age. Therefore, merchants may not rely on possession of a Visa card or submission of Visa account information to verify cardholder age.”
Mastercard indicates that (except where local regulations require some other limit) that the minimum age for reloadable and non-reloadable Mastercard products (prepaid cards) is 13 (USA, UK, and some EU countries). In Australia, the “Youth Debit Mastercard” is age 16+.
[...] Linden Lab has launched a new Age Verification process. This is causing more than a few waves, as Tateru and Ciaran [...]
@Tateru
Yes, when I say “bank”, I also mean any credit card company and PayPal (which are all to follow the same regulations, at least in EU).
As for your citation, “may not rely on” doesn’t mean “are forbidden to rely on”, so I was correct when I said that your affirmation (“using credit-cards as a form of age-verification is specifically forbidden by the card-companies”) was wrong. They just do not *guarantee* it (you “may not rely” on it, but you still *could* make it part of a verification process, and that’s exactly what most porn sites on Internet are doing everyday for many many years…).
As for prepaid cards, you can easily filter these out of the verification (the 4 first numbers of a credit card identify the bank/service to which the credit card pertains), and this lets you with only 16+ years *true* credit cards holders (and with my proposal of auto-verifying only people with payment info used for 2+ years; you then are sure they are 18+).
I wasn’t citing the merchant agreements that expressly forbid it. As far as I am aware, there aren’t electronic copies of those, so I just referred to an additional electronic document that is not a part of the standard merchant agreements. It is, as far as I am aware, still expressly forbidden (since 1997).
And zero-credit cards (like the youth debit card, as just one example) don’t have any distinguishing digit sequences to discriminate them from regular cards. Indeed, the cards can simply be upgraded to regular cards later on.
Maybe the effectively dropped that fake “age verification” thingy cuz they finally figured out that the “underaged” don´t have that much interest in SL, anyway? I mean, there are tons of places to go to for a curious 14 ys old. Like real bars´n clubz , real rock concerts, real beer, real fjords, real football riots, real real boyz´n gals on real poseballs….
Then porn sites are doing illegal verifications via credit card info for years…
As for special prepaid cards (I don’t know what “zero-credit cards” are: no such things here…), you could simply exclude from the verification system any bank/service that doesn’t provide a proper way of making a distinction with true (bank account linked) credit cards… That would exclude probably only a small proportion of the residents (much less than what the flawed Aristotle system did exclude).
Anyway, I’m happy with the new system (even though I’ll definitely be more demanding towards the apparent maturity of my RPing partners in adult sims, in an attempt to protect myself from cheating teens; for example, I was already reluctant to play with people using “u” for “you”, “r” for “are”, but it will definitely be a no-no from now on…).
The BIG plus of the new system is that it doesn’t segregate people based on their country (it’s already bad enough that EU residents are segregated based on the VAT that LL make them pay as an addition to the taxes that are paid by every resident in SL and that are part of the ‘normal’ fees).
@Henri Well, technically, the EU makes you pay VAT. Or rather, makes the Lab pay VAT, whether you pay it or not. Some EU citizens have been agitating for the introduction of a unique-service exemption – something you should talk to your EU representative about if you aren’t happy with having to pay it for SL.
@Vivienne True. If the Lab’s past stats are correct, SL holds increasingly less interest as age diminishes. With the age of the active population skewed up to the 40′s and older, it must seem to some of the younger users like they’re spending time in hangouts favoured by their parents and grandparents.
About VAT, LL should indeed pay VAT to the EU for their EU customers, just like they pay VAT to the US for their US customers, but this should make no difference to the residents, be them US or EU, or Australian, or what not: everyone should pay the same fees in SL. But that’s another discussion…
Henri, look up “Operation Avalanche” and “Operation Ore”, which involved credit card payments for access to porn sites, and a huge amount of stolen credit card info. And then some of the sites allowed access to child porn, at which point the investigation went crazy.
You want to use credit card to verify age? Your security had better be damn good.
@Wolf
SL has been using “Payment info on file” since day one of the adult policy to allow people with such info into adult sims. I was merely suggesting that they kept this first “verification” step to allow and grant age verification via the checkbox in the new form… This would decrease the risks of seeing cheating teens in adult sims, even if it won’t suppress it (such a risk is simply impossible to suppress).
Age verification is a sham. Even if there was a 100% valid and verifiable age check system, and even if it did stop minors from using the grid… poor kids, they’d be required to get their porn fix from… gasp… the Internet!!!
Why, yes raunchy website, I *am* 18, thankyouvery much CLICK… WELCOME TO OUR PORN SITE!
Does anyone really think pixel-driven avatars are anything close to what any minor can easily view on the world wide web 24/7/365?
The moment Linden Lab decided to make Second Life adult, they crawled in bed with snakes. From the very beginning they pretty much announced “Come get your cyber sex here!” Some of the Linden themselves were so publicly perverse it set the atmosphere for the entire board. They established their reputation early on, and pushed that to the max when they openly refused to stop age play (until of course, an entire government said “stop this or else”. Then they were all “Oh we’d NEVER allow that kind of thing HERE!”).
Linden Lab alienated legitimate businesses as they gained the reputation of a pedo site, set themselves up as an adult sex board, and promoted such on their website. They then alienated their residents when they tried to reverse that decision and said, “No no no, we’re going to stick the adult stuff over THERE, because we’re a nice wholesome board!” (scuse while we advertize the adult continent right on our splash page).
There is so much that’s wrong with this whole concept. Pretending that they even CARE if minors are on their grid is pretty transparent. We’re talking a company that decided to use a naked teenage girl as their default login avatar. That pretty much defined the company right from the start.
I wasn’t there for most of that ugly history.
But maybe it explains why some vulgar residents have seen me, and referred to me as a “pedobear”.
There is, in the USA, some pretty warped thinking about sexuality.
Wolf: “There is, in the USA, some pretty warped thinking about sexuality.”
Yeah, and just about everything else too.
I have to laugh (scornfully) at the mentality of the SyFy channel: they’ll block out nudity of all kinds, but don’t hesitate showing someone getting the top of their head blown off by a shotgun, or graphically torn in half by monster-of-the-week.
Sexuality and nudity is bad, murder and violence is okay?
SyFy isn’t alone in that of course. They’re just more in-yer-face about it than most others. Yeah, our society has some wierd thinking, all right. Let’s create laws blocking (supposedly) children from certain websites… while at the same time creating destructive weaponry that kills them outright on a daily basis, world wide.
Pretty warped world.
I use my own form of age verification, (I am being semi-humorous here, smiles)
————
I ask one of these questions such as these and evaluate the speed and accuracy of the reply..
“What is advantage of using a Medical Savings account versus claiming medical expenses as an itemized deduction?”
“When buying a new car, what specific resources (besides the internet) can you use to verify price and reliability of specific models?”
“What is the most common cause of divorce among people whose children have grown up and left home?”
“What does it cost to replace a roof on a small house?”
————-
Des.de.mona.
We are puritans at heart, Wayfinder.
.. also I suspect that as a result most us USies have dull sex lives and/or stale relationships. We may wish to not be reminded that sex can be interesting, smiles.
Des/de/mona
LOL Desmona. Speak for yourself. For me, I can say that… uh… hmmm… what were we discussing again?
;D
[...] Nino, nel suo articolo di commento “Well, I suppose age-verification doesn’t get much simpler“, cita le disposizioni della Commissione Statunitense sul Commercio in materia e spiega che [...]
[...] Tateru Nino informed us of the new simplified age verficiation process, by this time Linden Lab’s lack of informing us of events was getting extremely frustrating. [...]