By this I mean sites requiring stricter validation for accessing adult content, rather than just a simple checkbox. Stuff like credit card details or photos of government IDs.

This has been something that’s been rattling around in the back of my mind for a while now. And with the place I live passing legislation requiring porn sites to use stricter verification, it’s starting to feel like a real thing that can happen.

And… Honestly, it looks like this is probably going to start to be a thing everywhere, seeing how the world is going. To the point where VPNs are probably not going to stay a good way of bypassing it.

It’s causing me an unhealthy amount of worry, because of all the privacy implications and the fact that it means some sites could pull out of my country entirely.

I figure I may as well ask people’s thoughts and experiences here, rather than reading the same articles on Google over and over.

So, I guess some questions:

  • Have you done any of this kind of verification before? How did you find it? Do you trust them with your identity?
  • Would you consider sending images of your government ID to Discord/Google/Twitter/Bluesky/Furaffinity/esix to access adult content? They promise they use a third party verifier and delete it after use, of course.
  • What about using less “important” forms of ID, like phone numbers, credit card numbers and whatever AI face scanning technology is hot right now?
  • What about verifying for Yiffit and/or your favourite mastodon/lemmy servers? Presumably they’ll also defer to a third party verifier, but I feel they’ll try to go for a privacy focused one.

And let’s not talk too much about specific jurisdictions and whether or not they are “right” to do this kind of thing. Or if it’s going to be effective or not. I’m sure we all have thoughts about this, but that conversation isn’t likely to go anywhere.

@wander , if you have the time, I’d also be interested in hearing your thoughts on this, as a site operator. Especially considering France is one of the places trying to push this.

  • Awoos the KinkwolfOPEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    Okay, wow. Thanks to everyone for responding, I appreciate it. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting it to be quite so negative about the whole thing. I don’t know why I wasn’t expecting that, considering that we are a group of people that moved from a pro-privacy platform because it wasn’t pro-privacy enough. But anyway.

    I think that… Honestly, this being commonplace is going to be inevitable. The global mindset around this is changing, and even though we may fight against it, it feels to me to be an inevitability. Maybe I’m wrong. I hope I’m wrong. But I’m not optimistic.

    I mean, I hate it and it sucks, but honestly at this point I’d probably go through with this kind of verification. Assuming I could trust the sites or third party authentication or whatever. I guess my fear of loosing access beats my desire for privacy… And besides, I already pay for stuff on Patreon, so my identity isn’t exactly secret.

    One way of doing this privately I did see people suggest (and I think was being looked at by my government?) was the following:

    • You buy a card with a code from an IRL shop (who does the age checks with a driving license or whatever), which is valid for 24 hours.
    • You make an account with an identity provider using this code (maybe they’ll also want other information as well, because of course they will).
    • With this account, you can then generate any number of random single use codes to give to adult sites to log in. They won’t be able to see any of your account details, but they can use it to verify only that you are over 18.

    (Of course, I know this isn’t exactly perfect but it’s hopefully good enough)

    Hopefully a standard like that can arise, but I assume most third party identity providers will probably just use images of IDs and photographs. At least they promise to delete them afterwards, and I (perhaps naively) trust that most of them will.

    Still, on the upside, if Telegram and Discord do go through with this and use proper third party identity services, they can hopefully allow you to share that with servers you’re in, which means they don’t have to do their own verification (which they’ll do sloppily).

    Personally, I hope Mastodon and Lemmy integrate support for these third party age verification services rather than pulling out of certain countries on principle.

    Anyway, enough devils advocate and hoping that everything will be fine and work out in the end. Downvote away!

    • Awoos the KinkwolfOPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      … Yeah, I’m really scared and terrified at what the government will require. Especially when it comes to social media services like Discord and others (which it has in its sights). Hopefully nothing will come of it and the internet can go back to what it used to be…

      Fuck I’m messed up psychologically. ;_;