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?
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.
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.
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
I would’ve just blocked Louisiana instead of taking responsibility and liability for a bunch of sensitive personal information.
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
using your credit/debit card to verify your account is something that I also wouldn’t like to do. Same as using my ID
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.
expired
The thing is, the “software” actually is open source, so you can tell how data is requested from your smart ID. The german government ID has an explicit function for age verification that does not provide any personal information.
https://github.com/Governikus/AusweisApp2
However it is probably hard and costly to get certified to use any of those functions as a service provider.
For what website or service is that?
Something like this is exactly what I meant
No sadly I don’t. I guess for most plattforms its just so much easier to not host the server in Germany/EU…
If you do not know any website that does this, how do you know it is required in Germany? I have never heard of that
The thing is, that it is only required if the company is located in Germany. Thats why pornhub, a company run by Germans (afaik) does not have to do it… It was in the news multiple times, when the government tried to remove that condition so all porn sites accessed from Germany have to verify the age of the German visitors.
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
I dont know about that one. Following this logic why is it forbidden to sell alcohol and tabacco to minors or why are so many drugs illegal like everywhere, when good parenting prevents the use of these by minors? Of course this comparision is far fetched, but I dont think that the problem is solved by just filtering the internet access of minors.
Alcohol and drug use can lead to impaired actions when driving or otherwise contribute to causing people to harm other people. Same with tobacco and secondhand smoke. If the behavior of an individual drastically increases the likelihood that they will cause harm to others then I see the argument for government prohibition from minors. But I have yet to see a case where someone kills another due to the accused’s individual porn usage If there is sufficient empirical evidence that widespread porn usage is accessible by minors, is used by minors, and has shown a correlation to actual harm determined via experimental or observational meta study on existing cases, then I will be for id backed prohibition of pornography
But the prohibition of alcohol and tabacco from kids have nothing to do with saving other people from the effect these kids under the unfluence could have. The age limit is there to save kids from getting used to these substances in their early developement, so they don’t become addicted to them. Or am I missing something?
I guess thats a problem specifically for nsfw instances in Germany then.
i’m confused how it will work in the case that you view content from an instance in US through an instance in Germany. So your url will be the one of the german instance and it looks like the content comes from there, even though it is not. I guess it will end up instances blocking other instances that don’t share the same policies, resulting that effectively you would not be able to see such content at all. Unless there is another legal approach
The German instance might need to check the flag on the content against the flag on the user before rendering the page for the federated content.
this makes sense. My question (at least in mind) was more broader, like issues that may come up for content showing as it is hosted in instance X which is based somewhere where Y is illegal, while in fact the content itself will be hosted elsewhere where such law doesn’t exist. I’m not talking only for NSFW content.
Maybe some other countries included, but yes propably. But imo it would be beneficial for everyone, but I get that people disagree with that
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.