I still worry about the safety of letting the company they chose doing the verification. What is your opinion about it’s reputation, and residents beeing worried about giving out their information to it, Dallas?

All of this illustrates the problems with having a monopoly on anything. When a company has total control over a given thing and that is the only available thing of it’s kind it is a virtual monopoly, though not a legal one.

Regarding LL’s attitude in general:
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@Maxx

Max is absolutely right. LL has no real competition at this point so they feel free to do anything they want no matter what we think.

The development of OpenSIM and alternative platforms is a good thing. If I’m not here in a year… I will *certainly* be there. I believe that, with the development of such alternatives… LL will see a massive exodus from it’s servers.

The biggest problem is that LL stopped listening to it’s residents and started thinking only about the almighty dollar and the big corporate interests. While some might argue that this is all that they should worry about… I, personally, believe that a good company cares about it’s customers.

While some of us aren’t “concierge” members or even “premium” residents.. we are contributing to the money that LL has by buying and selling goods in the SL economy. So, the excuse that we’re not “paying customers” doesn’t work here either.

The simple fact of the matter is LL thinks they have us… so they will continue to jam in things without regard to what the residents think.

TO THE MODERATOR:
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I know that in the past I’ve been moderated out because my comments were controversial.

If you moderate me out… make it known to your superiors that we are not happy with Linden Lab… and we’re really not happy with how things are going.

Anony Mouse
“Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground..” ~ Stephen Sills

It may be voluntary to choose not to verify and lose a lot of money on investments, but isn’t it a very unfair choice to ask people to either lose a lot money or verify with a risky company?

A lot of this discussion has not just to do with the choice wether to verify or but with the bad and potentially harmfull way the age verification is done in.

I agree, it’s voluntarily to enter or stay in Secondlife but a big part of the discussion here is about the uncomunicative way the lindens are dealing with problems which will affect a large percentage of the residents financially.
It’s also voluntarily to use windows, but does it make it ‘fair’ to give people hope then just ignore their questions? Is it fair to sell people a 1600-real-dollar island and let them build a large shopping center then all of a sudden force something like this in, in the bad way it is done now? It’s not a bad thing to ask for people to be treated with respect.

I don’t think linden labs can make secondlife run perfect, because programming is a hard job and debugging is even harder. (I know from my own humble experience and seeing people so much better at programming than me at this still struggle with these kind of issues) But why not communicate some more with the residents? Why not answer some of our questions which we struggle a lot with, instead of ignoring them?

In your post, you say it’s not illegal to give out information like this. I wonder, have you checked the laws of european countries to make sure its not illegal to give personal information to companies? No, I bet you don’t. They might have policies just like the credit card companies. Just like many of us, you might not know enough of europan coutries law to make a statement like this. Thats why we are asking the lindens to give an official statement about this, so we know what we are about to do is safe.

The same goes about the company linden labs chose to do their verifying. Yes it may be voluntarily to register (or lose your content) but it’s unfair to expect residents to give their information to a company which has such an untrustworthy reputation and not make sure the information is safe. Why is linden labs not making any hard legal statements about this? It’s just a few lines of text they have to write to make this whole registration thing a lot easier to most of us. People have a right to be suspicious when they might be doing something that is potentially harmfull to their real lifes.
Sadly enough identity theft happens, and it’s strange to expect residents to register when Linden Labs does not make any hard offical and legal statement about this.

It’s not just a game anymore for many of us, it’s a real life company which has let thousands of residents invest hundreds of real life money in it. For many of us its not a silly game anymore which can be chosen to leave at any time without real life consequences. Its a real company with real money and decisions which affect our real lifes.

Linden Labs is asking us to do something which may be potentially harmfull our their real lifes (losing hundreds of dollars or potentially risking identity theft), so why would it be unfair to ask them to give people answers they need, to make sure they are safe, and have them try to spare peoples investments as much as they can?

This is not just a game service anymore, it’s a real life company people have invested real money in, and it’s about residents asking Linden Labs to spare their real life investments yet safe them from indentity theft and to communicate about how to make the large real life impacting company they have become be a safe place for us all.

They do have some limited information. http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pxbDc4B2FH96kmmllbXG0Ew&gid=0
As of July they had 88,797 premium members. In June there was 94,607. Significant drop but also a significant gain from May of 89,845.

What is not so good about these numbers is out of 1,363,009 (will consider these active members) that logged on during the last 60 days (2 months) there is only about 90,000 that are premium? I used to be a premium member a few times but there has never been a logical reason other than the ability to own mainland to be premium. The majority of people in SL do not want to own land they have to pay for so why would they become paying members? There is no reason to. So people complaining about non paid accounts really have no grounds for argument. Give people a good reason to pay for their accounts and they will.

I would like to see metrics on the damage and losses caused by billing data being hacked into. This could then be expanded into how this has affected customer base for identity theft.

LL time to treat your customers with respect and stop acting like a sweat shop from China