Technology

Years later, you will find many then teen’s 80yo grandmas’ photos in the leaked database

Hm, I'm going to need some software engineers to critique an idea I have that could at least partially solve the fears people have about their personal details being tied to their porn habits.

The system will be called the Adult Content Verification System (or Wank Card if you want to be funny). It's a physical card, printed by the government with a unique key printed on it. Those cards are then sold by any shop that has an alcohol license (premises or personal). You go in, show your ID to the clerk, buy the card. That card is proof that you're over 18, but it is not directly tied to you, you just have to be over 18 to buy it. The punishment for selling a Wank Card to someone under the age of 18 is the same as if you sold alcohol to someone under 18.

When you go to the porn site, they check if you're from the UK, they check if you have a key associated with your account. If not, they ask for one, you provide the key to the site, the site does an API call to https://wankcard.gov.uk/api/verify with the site's API key (freely generated, but you could even make the api public if you want) and the key on the card, gets a response saying "Yep! This is a valid key!" and hey presto, free to wank and nobody knows it's you! If you don't have an account, the verification would have to be tied to a cookie or something that disappears after a while for all you anonymous people.

As a result, you can both prove that you're over 18 (because you have the card) and some company over in San Francisco doesn't get your personal data, because you never actually record it anywhere. All you have is keys, and while yes, the government could record "Oh this key was used to verify on this site", they'd have to know which shop the key was bought from, who sold it, and who bought it, which is a lot more difficult to do unless the shopkeeper keeps records of everyone he's ever sold to.

So... Good idea? Bad idea? Better than the current approach anyway, I think.

I keep thinking about some of RPs I've done in my life. Hot, vile, smutty text based RPs. I think about them and wonder if there will ever be a time when those words would be considered illegal and I would be arrested for posting them. This doesn't just protect minors. It tags deviance. Some of you may know the darker corners of Reddit. Imagine if an AI flagged your subs. The delete-rebuild cycle doesn't work anymore. Reddit will always know. If the law asks for suspects for newly illegal thought crime, Reddit will be able to point to all the users on those dark corners. We are moving into a future where privacy doesn't matter and I fear what that means for the kinky among us.

Meh, just upload a dick pic.

I'm a UK citizen, fuck everything about this law. I'm so sick of the current authoritarian trend amongst some western countries. The UK is one of the worst offenders.

It's not even about protecting kids. It's about control and appeasing puritanical elements in society. We're the 6th richest economy in the world and we can't even offer some of the poorest kids food security. But at least they can't see a pair of tits on Reddit.

That said, as someone who has posted stuff like that and had it spread without my consent, screw (very much not literally) consuming that shit without taking the same risks as the people sharing what they get off to.

I do think its gross to require it for the other NSFW stuff. Drug forums are very important resources for harm reduction.

Parental controls exist. Use them instead. I fucking hate this.

Keeping the age verifier seperate from the content host is good. Destroying the files used for verification is good. On paper it's not too a bad system for age verification, but it really hinges on if you can trust them. Given the track record of basically almost every company and government ever...

Just upload a picture of any politician who voted for this.

This is what Facebook does to verify accounts, they also autoban if you try to register with a temp email

so those scam popups that scare people by saying their webcam was hacked and took pictures of them while looking at porn is getting state sanction!

We thought the same thing about Netflix with the sharing password bans. Yet they retained more profit than ever the next year.

Who's to say if this is what will make Reddit end, or did they actually just got more successful after the end of 3rd party apps compared to the declaration of so many users back then?

Digital personal verification is just going to become a fact of life in the future for everyone born after about 2012. They will use online ID cards, biometrics, location metadata that is constantly uploaded by our devices, maybe even implanted RFID encrypted chips for account verification. Passwords are becoming outdated and outmoded for security as we speak here. 2FA is the minimum security for online today but that may soon become outmoded as well.

Yeah, fuck all that.

Guess we're transitioning into a VPN only future.

We have the opportunity to head into a utopic or dystopic future and we're absolutely choosing the dystopic one.

Kier Starmer voice: “We are an island, of wankers”

u/spez was the lead moderator of r/jailbait, and when he was caught, he got rid of mod transparency. Ghilisaine Maxwell was likely a l lead moderator of news Reddits as well (u/MaxwellHill). Reddit has always been compromised.