The first impressions are the following: US residents get validated no matter how many typos (or deliberately faked data) they type; Europeans can’t get validated, no matter how often they try!

Exceptions exist on each side, of course, but I haven’t found many yet!

Huge megacorps can basically deal with anything that’s thrown against them and survive. Small corporations, well, buy insurance! And that’s what I believe that Linden Lab is doing.

They need one day to learn how to talk to the customers. I can see some nice examples when it comes to new features, but when it comes to communicating the policy decisions and customer support – it’s an absolute disaster.

I am personally not opposed to IDV. I am opposed to having yet another “treasury” which concentrates the personal information about the people. There are no absolute locks – all depends on the value of the information behind the door.

And the verified data about a few million individuals is something definitely interesting for the miscreants.

If all LL wanted to do is to verify the identity and the age for the human behind the account – why not go for a much simpler solution ?

One of the main criticisms with virtual worlds like Second Life (but others, too) has always been related to the concepts of identity, trust, authenticity etc. Many people accuse users of these worlds of “hiding behind a mask” (of their…

OK. Well, the same identical system works as well if I decide to have my name on my profile. Or my gender, or my age, or my location. I write it (or all of them), Integrity just checks it and sends to LL a code saying it’s correct. No data is stored anywhere, like you love so much (if you believe so… I will never buy this one, not from Integrity, but that would be a too long topic to be discussed here).

And there is no further development required. Not at all. Why should it be? And then again, this still is not a data base, so there is no need to comply to all privacy laws of the world (hmmm… BTW there are not so many laws about that in USA, I think…)

Regarding the fee: OK, I’m a basic user, they are just asking for a few lindens, so I could find them, somehow. But if I’m not a kid willing to waste some days on camping sites, I will just use my credit card. Don’t you think so?

Let’s say that I basically agree on your analisys, but in ny humble opinion you are missing some important parts of the “big picture”.

Thanks and Regards, Fabio.

Linden Lab: Redirects user to Integrity’s site; they locally store just the avatar’s name for this particular validation session
User: Types their own data on Integrity’s site. Integrity only knows there is a session associated with the dat, but has no clue what the avatar name is.
Integrity: Returns a token to Linden Lab saying: “user validated in our database” or “not validated”. Linden Lab knows now that the avatar for this specific session has provided enough data to Integrity to get validated. But Linden Lab has no way of knowing what data was provided.

So, in essence, as a resident, you provide avatar data to LL and RL data to Integrity. Neither exchange information. Although from a visual point of view, it all happens on the same browser for the resident, they are actually sending different data to different providers, and there is no link between both.

As said, this is the “best” model, since it doesn’t require LL to store any RL data (beyond already-stored billing data, which might be completely different anyway), and it doesn’t require Integrity to send back any data whatsoever. So, if LL’s databases are broken into, the cracker still doesn’t know what data was used for validation. Your identity is not compromised. (Granted, in many cases, your billing data might be the same data as what you’ve provided to Integrity; however, things like ID card numbers will never be stored by LL, and they won’t get anything from Integrity either). On Integrity’s site, there will be no additional data for their database: either they already have you on the database, or they don’t — so you’re not telling Integrity anything they don’t already know about yourself! More important, Integrity will not know your avatar’s name at all.

Changing all the above requires, of course, way more development, as well as local storage of additional data by LL. It is thus unlikely — but technogically possible — that LL will ever go that way, since for what they require — insurance against lawsuits — they don’t need any more information from Integrity. Additionally, in order to store more data beyond the necessary billing data, and being able to display that information to other users (ie. “this is the avatar’s age; this is their sex; etc.”) might require Linden Lab to register their own databases with several different agencies and regulatory bodies that control the amount of private data they can legally hold on their residents.

That’s why I don’t think this will come soon.

As for the fee, Robin implied that this fee would be paid with L$, not US$:

- age verification will have a one time fee associated with it. For those with premium accounts Linden dollar fee will be nominal. Basic accounts will pay a higher, but still relatively small Linden dollar fee. These fees haven’t been set yet.

This means that if you’re a Basic user and don’t trust LL with your billing data, you can still validate your avatar for age.

I mean, they announced this service, they can do it, and for many reasons that whould be too long to explain here, I think this was one of the main goals of the VID itself.

So, why shouldn’t they do it now? What kind of information do you have about it?

And another thing… The VID will require a fee. Then, more and more users with paymnet info. And this is, according to me, another very imposrtant aspect that you din’t take into account (and that can be related to what I’m saying above).

I’d really like to have a more detailed opinion by you, since I just wrote a couple of articles about the VID’s strategy.

Thanks and Regards, Fabio.