.
“It is important to note that privacy, in general, is clearly a big part of SL.
We must consider what things we need to do to be safe and legal on our own servers.
And, more generally, that these types of verification systems are, in the longer term, things people will likely build on their own.
We certainly would never push people to disclose gender or age, beyond what is needed for legal compliance.”                                                Philip Linden CEO of Linden Lab
 

AgeLock was developed by Second Life residents, as an alternative to Integrity/Aristotle - Linden Lab’s Identity Verification plan.

We believe the Integrity/Aristotle identity verification plan is far too intrusive, it violates our privacy, it actually breaks privacy laws in several countries and it is most certainly not based on “trust” as Linden Lab has stated.

The purpose of AgeLock is to allow Second Life residents to take responsibility for their own choices, to ensure that residents are aware and properly warned when they are about to enter an area containing adult content, and to allow residents to provide a declaration of intent and release of liability to content creators and land holders, without the need to provide real life identifying information.

The way it works
A land holder or content creator sets our scripted unit on their land. As new visitors arrive, they are scanned and checked against our database. If the avatar name is not already in the database, the avatar is addressed by the system with blue pop up windows.

The initial pop up window warns the avatar that there may be adult content in the area and that if they do not wish to, or are not legally permitted to view adult content, they should leave the area. If the avatar selects the option to remain then they will see another blue pop up window requesting that they input their real life date of birth and declare that they are of legal age to view adult content.

This information, avatar name, real life date of birth given, and acknowledgement of responsibility, will be added to our database. Once that is done, the individual will never be asked to go through the process again and will be cleared to access any land that uses the AgeLock system.

So an avatar visits, let’s say the Forum sim for example, they go through the system once, then when they visit another sim, owned by someone else, using this system later, they will not need to go through it again, they will already be in the database.

The ONLY real life information this system requires is the resident’s real life date of birth. More information than that is never needed, as the more important statement is the declaration that the resident is entering the adult area with full awareness and releasing land holders and/or content creators from any liability.

If it is discovered at a later date that a resident has lied about his/her age to bypass the system, it does not matter because it has been established that he/she was properly warned and given every opportunity to leave. It basically negates any “innocent victim” argument.

How does this system prevent children from accessing adult content?

It doesn’t. It won’t. It can’t.

As parents ourselves, we really do care about the importance of protecting children but this is not about protecting children this time. In this instance, our goal is to provide a sense of security for the adult community.
It is our opinion that, currently, the only system in place that can effectively keep children out of areas where they don’t belong is responsible parenting. We are not able to be the world’s baby sitters, even if it were our desire to be. The purpose of AgeLock is not to protect children or prevent them from viewing adult content, but rather to protect us, the adults of Second Life, from the indisputable fact that they already are.

Why is this being given away for free?
Currently we are releasing version 1 of AgeLock. Version 1 is our beta test version. We certainly could not and would not charge users to help us test our system. At a later date, when we are confident of it’s effectiveness, have completed several upgrades, and feel we have a large enough portion of the population in our database to be truly valuable to the community, then we will release a commercial version and charge a small (very small) monthly maintenance fee to keep the units connected to and communicating with our database.

This is not a project with which we expect to get rich in Second Life. We developed this for the Second Life community. Eventually we hope to simply cover our database and other minor expenses.

But that will be awhile in coming. For now, the units and service are completely free and we ask that users be aware that during this beta testing process, there may be the occasional glitch. This is the time during which we will be working those out.

For more information and to see a Demo of this system, please visit …..

AgeLock demo in world.

AgeLock was developed as a team project by the following Second Life residents:
Jamie David
DXW Undertone
Allana Dion
Property Resistance