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.
Yea, I have no idea why people are even attempting this nonsense. Perhaps they think that ‘computers are magic’, because it’s quite clear that nobody would try to verify someone’s age when it comes to posting images through snail-mail.
Of course if they wanted to give it a proper go, maybe someone could make a real age test:
- which of the following is more irritating:
- Gorillaz
- S Club 7
- N-Sync
- how much do nappies cost per month?
- which instrument do you use with a casette?
- screw-driver
- VHS player
- bic
- which type of phone was most popular in 1995?
- Nokia
- Rotary
- Chordless
Delightful questions.
My responses:
N-sync, bic, chordless
- which of the following is more irritating:
If pornhub doesn’t require an account or any verification then why should Lemmy, or just don’t post nsfw on the main instance and post on a nsfw instance
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.
No sadly I don’t. I guess for most plattforms its just so much easier to not host the server in Germany/EU…
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.
And what is with instances that federate with an nsfw instance. Its users are not asked for verification. I was just curious if ther will be a system that is doing something to prevent minors from seeing porn
No wtf a easy you can only enter when you are 18 pop-up should be absolutely enough.
Age verification is always a privacy issue.
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.
The problem with this is that in most countries/most services, you cant legally have any accounts before you are a certain age like 13 or 16. Also, babies cant make accounts and people would just sell old ones.
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.
expired
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)
like others said, there are downsides to every approach. Browser based would probably be the most reliable though, the bar for going around it would require a separate device or someone knowing how to install a completely different OS, under the age of 18, without their parents knowledge.
Which of course I knew how to do back in the days of Windows XP, but again that’s a very high bar for most people.
I can see Lemmy taking an official approach of “We’ll wait for that” because otherwise it’s scanning IDs on one end of the spectrum and the other end is a button that says “Yeah I’m totally over 18”
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.
Exactly my approach. Plus, I can’t, for the life of me, wrap my head around why porn is such an ever present concern, when so many other things, arguably as harmful, or IMHO more so, are apparently “totally okay”.
Yes, sure, porn addiction can be a problem, but I feel that this topic is actually a common fetish of certain people, who will happily ignore the neurological consequences of OTHER types of harmful content and behavior: YouTube autoplay, the constant stream of ads aimed at making us consume every single last bit of resource on the planet for 10 people’s net worth, the desensitization to violence, especially against beings different to us (different skin color, beliefs, species, etc)…
Yeah, but no. None of those things are a problem. Just PoOoOoOoRnNn… Will someone please think of the children?? And then what? Make a mandatory retinal scan before you can move a muscle? We wouldn’t want people to actually get addicted to the only last good thing they have in their life, right? All this, because we achieved making a truly ground breaking rotten society, and people’s “porn addiction” says more about the extent of their despair than anything else, really…
From what I understand it would work as other parental controls like on streaming services - i.e. parents of minors would configure the browser so it cannot open “inappropriate” content. The information wouldn’t need to leave the device ever.
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)
I could see value in having an option to the effect of “I’m the age of majority and I want to see adult content” in user profile options which is turned off by default, and if it’s turned off then the UI would show a warning about the nature of the content and the user’s current setting in place of posts or communities that have been marked as adult content.
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…
That is only relevant for instances hosted in Germany, and also why feddit.de and discuss.tchncs.de (like most instances, though) defederated from NSFW instances.
Age gates are a joke and almost no one uses them, xhamster even flouts the law and changes the German subdomain whenever there is a new idiotic ISP DNS block.
Related anecdote: I was hosting an erotica forum (which I started doing when I was 14 or 15 …) when the law came to be, we had to get a Jugendschutzbeauftragter (youth protection officer; luckily something that existed “as a service” for like 5€/month) and implement an age gate. This killed the site.
@BentiGorlich Kbin already has this functionality on https://kbin.social
I did not find something about that in their docs… Do you have a link for that?
