this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2025
1031 points (99.4% liked)
Technology
72957 readers
3499 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Problem is, how do we know that the company is reputable, audited, and so on?
I’ve seen more places requiring verification - and each one of them seems to use a different verification company. How are there so many of these places, and why aren’t they more commonly known? Like Experian for credit, etc.
Sure it might sound good to keep them separate - but all that is doing is absolving the content host from liabilities for providing the adult content (somewhere) on their platforms and sites. Reddit don’t want to get involved, and I’ll bet they found the cheapest and easiest provider, or the first one in the search list and thought “good enough”.
I think it's good that Reddit is trying to continue to allow adult content within the legal framework in which it must operate.
I guess what I'm not clear on it is what the legal framework is for verification services. Absent rules that require robust privacy protections market forces will push a race to the bottom in terms of cost and data security will be the first to take a hit.
I know this might seem weird but I think this is one of those cases where a blockchain based smart contract might be the best solution. I'm not exactly sure, as any system that allows one to consume content generally also allows one to copy it, but having a system defined in code in a publicly auditable manner that cannot be changed without notice seems to me to have the capacity to grant the most reassurance.
I mean I assume that all the verification company is doing now is verifying a person's age and then giving a kind of authorization token that's cryptographically secure that basically says "the owner of this cryptographic key is of age".