It might be possible to get age assured through other less invasive means than the current age verification. Unless you have a problem with age assurance itself, rather than the privacy, security, and safety implication of the methods Persona uses.
It’s useless for me to have, the implications is just more reasoning added upon the fact that I see completely zero logical reason for me to use age assurance.
Ok? My point was that you might get Age Assured anyway without even doing anything. If your VRChat account was created in 2021 or earlier, logically speaking, you would be 18 by now. VRChat might just apply that tag to any and all accounts where that is legally acceptable.
Useless to you personally or not, VRChat has legal requirements to meet and it does not have the resources to fight against that so compliance is the only logical way forward.
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I’m still confused about the age assuranxe thing…
If I get age assured automatically, I’m going to delete my account. I will not have my privacy infringed upon. If age is so important about me, you do not deserve my presence, my being, nor my mind. Good day.
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Can someone explain the difference between SPS and SPS-I?
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Sorry but you’re in a self-inflicted situation here, complaining about something that 99% of people would not agree with you on. Do you call it an “invasion of privacy” when you need to show ID to buy some alcohol? No? Why not in that situation? What about getting carded to enter a club?
Your privacy is not invaded just from being age assured this alternative automatic way, your exact birthday isn’t known. Your presence online after a given amount of time alone is evidence of being an adult, this is not a meaningful datapoint to invade your privacy, nothing else is known about you.
If you’re that paranoid about privacy, you shouldn’t even be making comments online, because that is a significantly more useful fingerprint for identifying someone across the internet.
Using voice chat in worlds? Even worse, now clients recording audio can also link a fully unique vocal profile to you to compare to samples from other services you might end up using.
It’s perfectly fine to have objections to something like Persona verification, but being against general anonymous age verification to the level of quitting if your profile was marked “adult” is highly suspicious. VRChat is a social space that allows for a much closer-to-reality form of interaction that thus necessitates the ability for people to restrict children from their spaces.
This isn’t “your age being important to VRChat”, this is “your age being important to most of the adult players”. And many kids would also like to make instances that adults aren’t allowed in so they can feel safer, just like in many real-world situations.
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Safety Improvements
The feeling of safety is subjective. While improving the public experience is a valid goal, the prevailing feeling in my usual circles is that VRChat itself is the biggest safety threat. You see, for non-public instances we already have plenty of moderation tools, be it self-moderation or group tools. The worst that another user can do is be an annoyance for a bit, before getting blocked or removed from the instance.
Now, consider the big brother. It watches. It only knows one exceedingly heavy-handed enforcement method of just banning for an arbitrary time span. Public bans of old days are seemingly not in use anymore. If you’re lucky, you would know what set the big brother off. If you’re unlucky, it was an ill-intended user infiltrating your group, and you’ll have no recourse for that. The current system is highly reminiscent of Soviet Union, with everyone having some dirt on everyone else, and everyone being just one report away from being disappeared by the state. Hardly ideal.
In this situation, the feeling of safety is understandably nowhere to be seen, especially among those engaging in provocative activities. The official “guidelines” are just hints for how to not get reported. There’s no good officially supported way to safeguard a private space from attracting big brother’s ire, be it via reports or via any automated measures hinted at.
If VRChat aims to be a proper space for adults, it needs to make sure that adults can feel safe in that space. Including when they’re doing provocative things. With the rich (self-)moderation tools available, it’s certainly not the big brother’s job to get involved in interpersonal drama. Keep your public spaces clean as you wish, but private space policing should be none of your business. And if you believe that the private spaces are already safe like that - communicate that better, explicitly allow things, set clear boundaries, and ensure that moderation works as promised, and not in the AI-fueled outsourced wishy-washy way that some people ascribe to it, with viral Twitter posts allegedly being the only effective way of appeal. Perception matters.
For comparison’s sake, look at two smaller social VR platforms. They have well-defined rules explicitly allowing provocative content and activities in specific circumstances. None of this “don’t get caught” or “report = lack of consent” uncertainty. And no ToS vs Community Gudelines/public messaging dissonance that many VRC users are not even aware of. Even Discord provides a better feeling of safety for adult spaces, by having explicit, specific rules for those, and not being restrictive beyond the legally required minimum.
In an ideal world, the content of private instances would be end-to-end encrypted, invisible to VRChat, and completely ignored for any moderation reports (or the reporter gets a slap for privacy violation). In an ideal world, VRChat would also know more gradual punishments too, be it warnings, spot content removals, multi-strike systems, public-only restrictions, and more, to ensure that their policing of their public space is fair, transparent, and doesn’t needlessly affect users’ ability to gather in private. I doubt we’ll get to that ideal world, but every step one could take towards it would be a step in the right direction.
And before anyone mentions actual illegal stuff: there’s a proper way to invade people’s privacy, with police, warrants, and the like. It’s also more effective at stopping actual criminals. Nobody is asking VRC to let illegal activity slide, but there’s a vast gulf of perfectly legal stuff that currently runs the risk of getting a ban, which this is all about.
Age Assurance
I hope that this implies a turn towards less privacy-invasive assurance methods for users globally, not just in the UK. Support for EU’s present/upcoming anonymous age verification schemes would be welcome here — or any other method not involving all the personal data being collected via Persona currently.
Unity 6!
It provides a surprisingly decent CPU performance uplift - kudos to Unity engineers on that, and keeping on providing VRC with secret sauce builds. I’m curious to see how VRC’s future content/shader update plans would play out. It’s a bit sad to see a fair bit of older content die to “serverside checks failed”, and future content compatibility is always a hot topic.
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So if they mark your as being older than 18 without requiring your secret private intimate details you’re going to leave? I thought you had something against age verification, but I guess it’s just contrarianism…
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I don’t buy alcohol, nor do I go to clubs. I don’t care if it’s exact birthday, that’s not the point. You fail to realize that this is an anonymous account, and you assume I use my real voice that doesn’t exactly matter that much anyway (let alone get one). I’m marked as suspicious because I don’t do things most people on VRChat do. I don’t ERP, drink, or smoke and because of that I’m discriminated against. I see VRChat as a creative tool to express myself and I’m going to try to do that without you knowing my information. I’m not important to most adult players anyway, they can stay in their age gated instances and leave me alone. God forbid I try to be myself.
I do not want to associate myself with anyone sexually, and because of that I shouldn’t have to give out anything regarding my age.
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Something that was just mentioned in the VRChat Developer Stream, for which I didn’t see a notification yet. VRC+ users can claim 350 free credits from the shop until July 30th.
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Will VRChat take away access to my own custom uploaded avatars if the avatar is forced tagged as “Sexually Suggestive” and I refuse to do the age verification thing?
There’s this concerning trend of more and more things being locked behind age verification.
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I can try to answer this on behalf of others, from the current Build 1865.
The short answer may be: No* (and I hope not), this not how it works right now (as of Build 1865). Asterisk, because some avatars will be unlisted and it may become more difficult for you to discover filtered avatars you’ve uploaded.
When content is gated from you via content gating settings, filtered avatars will appear in your “Recently Used” and Favorite Avatars but not in “Uploaded”. Your uploaded filtered avatars will also be unlisted from https://vrchat.com/home/avatars and the Content Manager in VRChat Avatars SDK, but you can access them directly by avatar ID (which you most likely know).
If your content gating settings are enabled, you can continue seeing, wearing and switching into content gated avatars you’ve uploaded yourself (including thumbnails) from Recently Used and Favorite Avatars (but not from Uploaded), but if you were wearing a public content gated avatar made by others your avatar will be forcefully changed out of that public avatar locally into “Filtered Avatar” (which appears as the VRChat default Robot avatar in app in “Current Avatar” for yourself locally, but this is a small lie or deceit because you’re actually wearing the public avatar with content warnings according to VRChat Home website).
You will not see the thumbnails of filtered public avatars others have uploaded in app, cannot see the 3D preview of these avatars, and cannot change into these avatars in app. If you try to access a filtered public avatar via the website directly, you can see the thumbnail of the avatar and successfully switch to the avatar from there, but you’ll receive a message in-app: Avatar is not accessible due to your Content Gating settings. and you’ll see yourself locally as a VRChat Robot in app. This message reminder is also repeated on every VRChat app launch.
Below is what the filtering may look like in on/off states for public & private avatars in recently used, including avatars you’ve uploaded yourself in the right winglet. (Click to show blur spoilers.)
In my opinion, I think this is a good solution because this avoids the need to switch to local SDK test avatars to see the same avatars without content gating, and keeps the incentives to have content appropriately tagged with content warnings for others.
If the developers say so, this may be subject to change, but I’m telling how it’s working right now.
(The ability to see filtered avatars you’ve uploaded yourself with black-yellow warning tapes from Recently Used / Favorite Avatars seems new to me.)
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If by whatever ungodly reason, age assurance gets applied somehow automatically I would presume the process to get rid of verification would apply to it as well hopefully easier than contact?
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Thanks for asking by the way, I made a feedback post on VRChat Feedback based on this question and answer: [1865] Avatars you’ve uploaded which have been forcefully filtered by Content Gating may incentivize creators to remove content warnings for usability/discoverability | Voters | VRChat
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Hello VRChat Team,
First of all, thank you for all the hard work you continue to put into VRChat. I understand that protecting younger users and complying with local laws is an important responsibility.
However, I would like to share some concerns about the new Age Assurance system.
My biggest concern is privacy. Many users choose VRChat because it allows them to socialize while maintaining a certain level of anonymity. Even if a trusted third-party handles the verification, many people are still uncomfortable providing government IDs or facial data online. Privacy is one of the reasons why VRChat has become such a unique and welcoming platform.
I also hope you will continue to explore alternative verification methods that require less personal information. If there are privacy-friendly options available, I believe more users would feel comfortable using the system.
If Age Assurance is being introduced mainly to comply with legal requirements in certain countries, I respectfully ask that it be limited to those countries where it is legally required, rather than becoming a mandatory global system.
Please do not make Age Assurance mandatory for countries that have no legal requirement for it. Many users outside those regions may feel that mandatory verification is unnecessary and could negatively affect the trust and openness that have always been part of the VRChat community.
I am also concerned about the planned avatar content restrictions. While I understand the goal of protecting younger users, I worry that the current approach may be too restrictive and could end up limiting many avatars that are intended for adult users or are simply creative artistic expressions.
One of VRChat’s greatest strengths has always been its community and the creativity of its users. I hope future policies will continue to support creators rather than unintentionally discouraging them. Many of us are passionate about creating avatars and worlds, and we hope VRChat will remain a platform where creativity can thrive while still providing appropriate protections for younger users.
Please consider avoiding overly broad restrictions and allow adult users to continue expressing themselves freely within appropriate age-restricted spaces. I hope the system can distinguish between genuinely inappropriate content and avatars that are simply stylized, fashionable, or creatively designed.
I hope VRChat can continue to protect younger users while also respecting the privacy, creativity, and freedom of adult users around the world.
Thank you for listening to community feedback, and thank you for your time.
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Hoorah to you. I’m glad I’m not the only one with this defense memo, and I hope this works out like we want it to. My defense was personal but was still about anonymity, as perspective is something to take account. Keep up your work.
Besides “Where’s Soba” I guess I don’t have anything to really say about this update.
It both is good and unfortunate at the same time. It is what it is I guess.
You have to keep in mind that one of the major reasons for age verification is to add increased protection to adult users from underaged users entering places they shouldn’t be, and to underage users from being exposed to inappropriate content and situations.
I’d argue that these concerns are very important and have priority over other concerns.
The main problem I’m having is enforcement, I don’t want to be forced into showing anything. To lock more and more under age requirements is one thing, but at least something as bad as Roblox doesn’t actually force me into giving anything if I don’t want to. Some might even argue that it’s ageist to enforce any age identification for the sole sake of others, which would be against their own policy.
Anonymity is my defense against bad people and discrimination, if individuality is a crime then I don’t want to be here since you all are so bent to attacking me for wanting to have anonymity.
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