I saw an interesting bit coming across the news feed yesterday regarding something billed as the First Virtual World Credit Card. The credit rate is horrendous (but aren't they all) and the limit is so low as to only be practical for the superfluous purchases of avatar tinkering. But this credit card does mark an interesting point in the evolution of Second Life, which, for all its faults, provides a testing ground for issues that would be tasked against a possible future Virtual Web. In this case, we see an example of identification (if choosing the gold option) and payment subcutaneous to an anonymous avatar overlayer. Closed systems do not have to deal with this. They function either not needing such methods of validation or one is already validated, in a sense, by the process of subscription to access the space and create an account.
A more distributed system, ala a Virtual Web, I suspect would not have an embedded validation method in place, courtesy of a single vendor. How then to manage validation, secure payment, and transfer of pertinent details, such as real name and contact information?
I've put forth that we need to evolve our need for identification to be on a verified but hidden level only, allowing for personal choice regarding anonymity and appearance. Avatar appearances, at least in the successful virtual worlds, have no guaranteed match to the actual persons anyways. Dress standards are all right when functioning in a business sense. But trying to enforce some sort of visual conformity on the general populace because we can't think past the surface is asking to be unpopular and abandoned, imho.
IF one accepts this requirement for anonymity, how can I ever really be sure that the person I'm buying from really is who they say they are? How can they be sure I am who I say I am?
Are we always going to have to access intermediaries like PayPal or eBay as the price for anonymity with some level of validation? Or are we going to be able to do person-to-person interactions with verified means when necessary?
Related to the topic of identification, I see that Linden Lab is now going to require identification to enter certain naughty zones. I'm not sure of the exact mechanism, but as I understand it, one has to be essentially "carded" when going in, providing a drivers license or passport number. Naughty zones are not a concern for me but the mechanisms for access are. Not just based on age, but security, paid-access, child-protection are all going to require some sort of access control. I think that the method Linden Lab is apparently applying in this test-case is too cumbersome. I suppose it is a stop-gap for now, but if I read that right, it seems both inaccurate (what if my parent was passed out from a binge and I "borrowed" theirs?) and insecure (like I trust Linden Lab with that info? They can't even get their application to run on Vista).
There is talk about having to sacrifice rights in order to preserve them (which I think irl is a crock, imo) but there is some truth to this when considering virtual worlds. A child in the real world wouldn't even consider entering into such a "red light" district but could consider going in as a poser because virtually he's indistinguisible from an adult if he so chooses. If a little kid asked me IRL about buying my used car, assuming she wasn't packing a really prodigious wad of cash (in which case, I can't say the thought of throwing in wood blocks so her feet could reach the pedals might not cross my mind), I'd chuckle and not bother getting involved in a pointless interaction. But in a virtual world, how do I size up a valid prospective buyer from someone who's a waste of my time?
How do we access information that would be ours by right visually in real life, and yet preserve the virtual bill of rights, including article 17: "A man is a man, unless he wants to be a woman, or wear bunny PJs."?
Again, I think a unified model is going to have to wrestle with this conflicting duality of needs. I think that user accounts would need to have some sort of sublayer linked to real identification and payment methods. Such should also be seamlessly accessed by the browser, say upon trying to walk through a virtual door, age screening is done automatically. None of this carding stuff. Children could register in schools; teachers would be equipped with processes to get their charges safely into virtual worlds, knowing that the alarm bells and virtual iron gates would close if said precocious young'uns try to get into places they shouldn't. And if little miss tried to yank my chain a bit for fun by pretending to buy a car with her virtual adult self, maybe I couldn't get her real age, maybe I couldn't access anything real about her except to verify that "she" was "old enough" to buy a car.
And when Dateline and Chris Hansen's avatar next decides to undertake another episode of To Catch a Virtual Predator, parents can know that those bad and troubled avatars got away but the people behind them did some very real jail time.
By giving up some "rights" as to anonymity to allow for basic functions of commerce and verification in a hidden but accessible based-on-need manner, I think the issues around preserving surface anonymity would go away. I would argue that it would encourage more use since people, as long as they felt they could trust the integrity of the verification process, would be more inclined to use the Web, virtual or otherwise. But trust, now as Shakespeare would have it, "ay, there's the rub."
Such a system would have to be absolutely transparent in its application, with no potential for misuse. As to who maintains, and even more important, who has access to, the information behind the avatars is the key issue.
You know, eBay and PayPal aren't looking so bad after all. Maybe that's what it would take: bonded intermediaries who can vouch for you and who provide these go-betweens. Given the varying laws about what age constitutes legal access, local companies who are vetted by some standards organization can carry on that function. Though we would still have to give up some information if we wanted to function beyond the purely social, there would at least be some choice about which vetting agency, and some accountability if any such should fail in their duties to keep my information secure.
A more distributed system, ala a Virtual Web, I suspect would not have an embedded validation method in place, courtesy of a single vendor. How then to manage validation, secure payment, and transfer of pertinent details, such as real name and contact information?
I've put forth that we need to evolve our need for identification to be on a verified but hidden level only, allowing for personal choice regarding anonymity and appearance. Avatar appearances, at least in the successful virtual worlds, have no guaranteed match to the actual persons anyways. Dress standards are all right when functioning in a business sense. But trying to enforce some sort of visual conformity on the general populace because we can't think past the surface is asking to be unpopular and abandoned, imho.
IF one accepts this requirement for anonymity, how can I ever really be sure that the person I'm buying from really is who they say they are? How can they be sure I am who I say I am?
Are we always going to have to access intermediaries like PayPal or eBay as the price for anonymity with some level of validation? Or are we going to be able to do person-to-person interactions with verified means when necessary?
Related to the topic of identification, I see that Linden Lab is now going to require identification to enter certain naughty zones. I'm not sure of the exact mechanism, but as I understand it, one has to be essentially "carded" when going in, providing a drivers license or passport number. Naughty zones are not a concern for me but the mechanisms for access are. Not just based on age, but security, paid-access, child-protection are all going to require some sort of access control. I think that the method Linden Lab is apparently applying in this test-case is too cumbersome. I suppose it is a stop-gap for now, but if I read that right, it seems both inaccurate (what if my parent was passed out from a binge and I "borrowed" theirs?) and insecure (like I trust Linden Lab with that info? They can't even get their application to run on Vista).
There is talk about having to sacrifice rights in order to preserve them (which I think irl is a crock, imo) but there is some truth to this when considering virtual worlds. A child in the real world wouldn't even consider entering into such a "red light" district but could consider going in as a poser because virtually he's indistinguisible from an adult if he so chooses. If a little kid asked me IRL about buying my used car, assuming she wasn't packing a really prodigious wad of cash (in which case, I can't say the thought of throwing in wood blocks so her feet could reach the pedals might not cross my mind), I'd chuckle and not bother getting involved in a pointless interaction. But in a virtual world, how do I size up a valid prospective buyer from someone who's a waste of my time?
How do we access information that would be ours by right visually in real life, and yet preserve the virtual bill of rights, including article 17: "A man is a man, unless he wants to be a woman, or wear bunny PJs."?
Again, I think a unified model is going to have to wrestle with this conflicting duality of needs. I think that user accounts would need to have some sort of sublayer linked to real identification and payment methods. Such should also be seamlessly accessed by the browser, say upon trying to walk through a virtual door, age screening is done automatically. None of this carding stuff. Children could register in schools; teachers would be equipped with processes to get their charges safely into virtual worlds, knowing that the alarm bells and virtual iron gates would close if said precocious young'uns try to get into places they shouldn't. And if little miss tried to yank my chain a bit for fun by pretending to buy a car with her virtual adult self, maybe I couldn't get her real age, maybe I couldn't access anything real about her except to verify that "she" was "old enough" to buy a car.
And when Dateline and Chris Hansen's avatar next decides to undertake another episode of To Catch a Virtual Predator, parents can know that those bad and troubled avatars got away but the people behind them did some very real jail time.
By giving up some "rights" as to anonymity to allow for basic functions of commerce and verification in a hidden but accessible based-on-need manner, I think the issues around preserving surface anonymity would go away. I would argue that it would encourage more use since people, as long as they felt they could trust the integrity of the verification process, would be more inclined to use the Web, virtual or otherwise. But trust, now as Shakespeare would have it, "ay, there's the rub."
Such a system would have to be absolutely transparent in its application, with no potential for misuse. As to who maintains, and even more important, who has access to, the information behind the avatars is the key issue.
You know, eBay and PayPal aren't looking so bad after all. Maybe that's what it would take: bonded intermediaries who can vouch for you and who provide these go-betweens. Given the varying laws about what age constitutes legal access, local companies who are vetted by some standards organization can carry on that function. Though we would still have to give up some information if we wanted to function beyond the purely social, there would at least be some choice about which vetting agency, and some accountability if any such should fail in their duties to keep my information secure.
