I’ve seen multiple requests for nsfw lemmy communities like reddit has. I live in Germany, and I think you are required to verify that the users that see porn content are above the age of 18. Does Lemmy has or plan to have a feature for that? Maybe this should be an issue on github?
In all the history of the world, there has never been an effective technological solution to a sociological problem, legislation mandating such a solution notwithstanding.
Any technological solution you find or build that appears to be effective is merely an illusion of effectiveness to those unaware of its limitations.
Can we do this in a way that handles:
- Accounts that were registered 18 years ago
- Control of accounts elsewhere that were registered 18 years ago
- Anybody who can sign something with an 18 year old key
- Anybody who some ordinary humans can vouch for
- Anybody who has a magic cookie from some kind of distributed system that does this
- Anybody whose browser thinks they are 18
Determining that people are a certain age shouldn’t be the magic power of enormous companies or government ID issuers.
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According to this wikipedia article it is mandated for pornography in Germany and the UK. Interestingly enough some alcohol companies in the US also try to verify their users age to ship them alcohol… So yeah a pretty isolated problem I guess
While the UK government abandoned this legislation
The law never really became law, it was dropped before the enactment date by Boris (because he loves his porn too much)
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I think they meant verification in the sense of a popup that asks you.
Nope I meant real verification. Pornhub doesn’t require it, because the server and the company are not stated in Germany. Imo all porn site should have real verification instead of the “I am 18 or older” popup, that literally does nothing to prevemt minors from seeing porn.
nanny state regulations shouldn’t be a replacement for simply expecting parents to do their job and ensure their kid doesn’t have unfiltered internet access
Wtf I don’t want my personal ID in a database
This is what I see when I access pornhub from my home in Louisiana without a VPN.
I would’ve just blocked Louisiana instead of taking responsibility and liability for a bunch of sensitive personal information.
What the actual fuck. It’s just people having sex, for gods sake.
Yea, it’s pretty bad here.
https://apnews.com/article/louisiana-porn-verification-age-law-84c1883da24512effe6ab206284b0540
One solution that could work in the future is that the personal device (computer or smartphone) could have the basic info that the owner is over 18 and therefore only give a “yes they are over 18” confirmation to the website without sharing any personal info.
How would you do that without giving someone both your personal info as well as the option to track what you’re doing
No idea I’m not a programmer
That is not necessary for age verification. You just have to go through a working verification process and then you just get the checkmark in the database. most sites that really verify your age use credit cards for that, which are of course sub par, because children can just take the cards from their parents, but it is better than nothing
And this process does not necessarily have to use ypu personal ID
Never heard of something like that. Do you have an example of a website which dies that?
I can verify myself using my Id card and a terminal or via NFC. The app used is the middleware between software or website requesting verification and my ID. No data leaves my ID in direction to the software or website. The middleware just gives a thumbs up to the verification request.
Lemmy is a platform managed by a disparate group of operators all with different levels of experience and commitment.
Verifying identity online is both a hard problem and a legal/security nightmare. It involves validating and possibly storing things like government identification or other sensitive personally identifiable information.
There is no way this will ever be implemented in the core platform. All existing solutions today are outsourced to third party companies with the expertise in validating different forms of identification as well as the legal insurance required to warehouse it.
And all of this is setting aside the obvious fact that you should not be required to doxx yourself in order to view pornographic content online. Minors will just go somewhere else outside of the jurisdiction of these rules and still get access. Hell, just turn off safe search on Bing and you can find porn.
Measures like this don’t actually stop minors from accessing pornography. They only put law abiding citizens at risk by forcing them to trust private companies with their identification and hope their government doesn’t decide to further police their morality, or use their revealed sexual preference against them.
Pornhub is proposing something that would be enforced on the browser/operating system level, and then the service providers would only need to specify the minimum age for a certain resource. While there are obvious limitations with this approach, it would work much better than the current approaches for distributed services.
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That would be an interesting approach, but browsers are easily switched (to a “jailbroken” one) and I wouldn’t trust windows with such information… Linux would be fine, but I guess the linux community would at least be torn on this one (though I might ofc be wrong)
If you’re old enough to get around those controls, you’re old enough to view porn, frankly. It’s like a rite of passage that I went through 15 years ago… the parental controls were also much worse then, so it’s arguably more effective now.
TL;DR Most people are against a age verification where you would input your personal ID or credit card. Adding a popup would be nice though (if it doesn’t already exist)
Thinking about all the included responsibilities, legislation, etc. gives me headache so I will not bother setting up a NSFW instance, from which thought the question originated… Thats propably why there isn’t a good one right now
You shouldn’t host nsfw from Germany in general, our laws are so confus and unreliable in that regards…
