Age Verification  Due to applicable UK laws, websites must verify the age of visitors using official ID to confirm they are at least 18 years old. We are a small site and unfortunately do not have the resources to implement such a system, so we are unable to serve users in the UK.  We are not required to verify your location, so please confirm below:  [I am not in the UK] [I am in the UK]

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[–] 281 points 1 year ago (13 children)

Frankly this is a comically brilliant and absolutely outstanding example of engineering malicious compliance

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  • [–] 101 points 1 year ago (12 children)

    Sadly, will not actually be sufficient. They put the full burden of this shit on the site owner, all of it, without exception.

    You could host in a country like Cameroon, they won't give a shit and EU won't bother going after them. They could geoblock the whole country however.

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  • [–] 60 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Meh you just say “we don’t serve users from your country, we are not bound by your laws. users from the UK are breaking our tos”

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    This already happens occasionally with the EU's GDPR.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    it does, but i don’t think they’re actually following GDPR… GDPR applies to residents of the EU; not where they are accessing the content from… technically, if an EU resident accesses a non-GDPR-compliant site while visiting the US (etc), the site is still legally obligated to follow GDPR

    it’d be way to difficult and probably ineffectual to enforce since the entity doesn’t necessarily exist in the EU (and they have bigger fish to fry, among many other reasons), but technically it’s there and they could probably do things like blocking executives from entering the EU or arresting them if they enter

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Yup, that's what we're saying. Some sites don't work in EU because they don't want to comply with GDPR, so it's likely some sites will stop working in UK because they don't want to comply with their anti privacy laws.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    that’s not super convincing though… just like TOS isn’t a protection for murder and other serious crimes, it can’t protect against all things. i’m not sure how the law is worded, but it’s not quite so cut and dry

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  • [–] 42 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    It's pretty sufficient. I'm not British, I don't sell products in Britain, I do not have British assets, and I'm compliant with all American laws. They can levy all of the fines they want but I'm not obligated to care.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    unless you ever want to visit the UK

    of course if you don’t ever want to, that’s fine… or if you’re small enough to fly under the radar

    but just because you have no presence doesn’t mean you’ll never have any presence

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  • [–] 23 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    They could geoblock the whole country however.

    The Great Firewall of TERF Island

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    we can compromise and just firewall jk rowlings house

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  • [–] 154 points 1 year ago (17 children)

    physically im in the uk mentally im literally anywhere else

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  • [–] 59 points 1 year ago (8 children)
  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    this would be great because according to kerli estonia is made of ice cream mountains and chocolate skies.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    How does a digital residency do anything...

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (7 children)
  • [–] 21 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    i'm not sure australia is a real place tbh

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    You're confusing it with New Zealand, which is clearly made up.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Agreed, they are confused.

    Australia is where the spiders and kangaroos are.

    New Zealand is where the hobbits are from, clearly imaginary.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago*

    Nah, oz is cooked already, in this case 'social media ban' for under 16s, same identity/privacy issues no doubt once they get their shit together but this time you're giving ID to meta and tiktok instead of pornhub, significantly worse IMO. Germany's going after adblockers. Shit's bad out there...

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  • [–] 94 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Appropriate that being in the UK is the negative option here

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  • [–] 77 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    UK has been on a killing small businesses streak since Brexit

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  • [–] 50 points 1 year ago* (10 children)

    I recently looked through the requirements on Ofcom's website, and to me it sounded like every email service falls well into their "user to user communication" category, which would have to "assess the risks". It's not really different than communicating in an internet forum, except it's not public, but that's not really a factor i think. Sending porn via email is probably as old as email itself.

    Email providers cant moderate their users' mails (i mean they could try, but that would likely be the end of them for the obvious breach in privacy). And having people have to age-verify for an email account would be ludicrous, especially considering children need emails for school, etc.

    I wonder if they ever clarified anything about email services and how they would or would not be affected by this bullshit law.

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  • [–] 42 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    You can get porn in a google image search, even in the UK. No ID or login required. I did see a comment about it not applying to search engines, which really does make you wonder what is the fucking point!!

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    So a company can collect copies of everyone's ID cards.

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  • [–] 58 points 1 year ago (17 children)
  • [–] 42 points 1 year ago (12 children)

    This isn’t considered verification in the UK from what I can tell. Companies are now implementing AI face scans, ID checks and credit card verification to comply with the UK law. I’m not a lawyer or even British, but it wouldn’t make sense to me that companies would spend money to turn away their UK customers otherwise.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    How are they checking that your website’s face scans are actually ‘working’ and not just passing everyone?

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    Also what stops someone just getting OBS virtual webcam and just feed it stock video of some old geezer...?

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    They make you do things like open your mouth and smile

    You'd have to use a video game... Which people are doing

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    New business idea, renting out your face via video feed to let people bypass age checks.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    You're not thinking big: Rent out other people's faces!

    Instead of an actual click farm where slave workers click phones all day, you make an app.

    The app works like this: When the users (or let's call them: "Partners") get a notification from your app, they just have to smile at the camera, sometimes do other expressions. They are then rewarded with points which they can trade for for actual real life discounts on real online stores. Something like 1 cent per picture.

    You now setup a service for people who want to bypass facial age verification and feed their requests directly to the app for a small fee of 5 cents per verification.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    Rough business model to compete with free

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Even if 3D images are required, surely there are 3D deepfake faces people can wear. But anyway, we're being distracted by the part of this law that stops kids going online. The quiet part is the part that gets every adult to show their real face to some website. Those adults need deepfake faces just as much if not more so.

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  • [–] 47 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    If they have no infrastructure or legal presence in the UK they are not required to do shit. The UK can block them but that's about it.

    The UK does not have extraterritorial jurisdiction! Whatever stupid shit they do on their shitty little island does not affect foreign firms that do not operate there.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    kinda… if you never plan on visiting the UK or any country with extradition agreements with the UK, sure… not sure exactly how extradition works, but if you ever come to a country and have big fines etc pending then they can do whatever they want

    if you were like.. the CEO of reddit or something, and just chose to forgo ad revenue etc from the UK but still remain operational, i’m pretty sure they’d be able to get you

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago*

    So extradition varies greatly. But generally (extremely generally, treaties vary a lot) countries will extradite if what the person is accused of is:

    1. A crime in both countries
    2. Carries a penalty of at least 6 months prison in both countries

    However basically no country will accept extraterritorial claims of another state simply because it impinges on their own sovereignty. It makes the UK somehow more soviergn than the country where the supposed crime was committed, in this case the US.

    The exception to the above rule tends to be crimes against humanity and war crimes. But obviously that is irrelevant to this case.

    You are correct that were they actual charged with a crime for violating this act they could not go to the UK.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago

    Please post this to r/Unitedkingdom.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago

    Clever girl

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    Sometimes :3

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)
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    [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Ironically, you can just lie to get past it.

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