Given the increasingly alarming trend of governments passing laws to force online age verification, and online services starting to include said enforcements in their ToS (e.g. Fluxer), I’m thinking we should be up to date with the state of affairs by adding a new case that indicates its inclusion in a service’s policies.
Checklist
With all being said, I wanted your feedback regarding the case’s specifics:
What rating should we give to it? Positive, Negative, or Blocker?
What weight shall be given to that case?
In what topic shall this belong to?
How will it be named?
What description should be given?
I’m not deeply invested in this issue, but I know a lot of people are worried about these measures and don’t have a good view of these. Hence why I’m asking for your input.
I get what you’re saying, but I believe our duty is to be as clear and concise to the end user as possible.
While us internally may be able to (somewhat) understand what each case implies, common users may not make the connection necessarily, nor should they be expected to. Therefore adding a case that explicitly relates to this is, in my opinion, in the users’ best interest.
Initially we could edit/extend the wording for any of such cases to include this topic, but that would certainly compromise the quality of many reviewed points with said cases.
I’m a firm believer that we should avoid having cases with optional wording (“and/or” or “with/without”, etc), and instead split them into separate cases. This is to avoid confusion.
Also we cannot (nor should) rely on users going out of their way to read a specific case’s description on Phoenix.
You and I know that people stick with first impressions (I’d argue this is in ToS;DR’s core philosophy).
Let’s collect some quotes from legal documents and see how they talk about it.
Right now I think in the direction of:
Title: “This service requires proof of your age to access adult-only content or features”
Classification: Neutral
Why neutral? I am very for age gating addictive sites like gambling. So if it is good or bad really depends on the service.
And privacy wise it really depends on the method and I believe how private the method is should be covered by a second point like Terms of Service; Didn't Read - Phoenix
Description: Commonly known as “age verification”, you’ll have to provide your personal data to be able to access some (or all) features provided by a given service. Some of this data might be of a sensitive nature.
Reason For Title Change
Some services will certainly need age verification to access them entirely. Thoughts?
Hope you don’t mind me adding my 2c.
So far I’m seeing 3 different kinds of Age Verification and they radically vary in invasiveness/security concern.
You provide non-identifying proof of age (just self-reporting “I am over 18”; or buying some kind of proof where your name/card/the point of the purchase aren’t known to the vendors or service, ala Japan’s conbini ticket system)
You must provide legal id, facial scan, or other sensitive legal documents to the service
Your behavior using the service is monitored extensively to automatically inference your age
And, once that data is collected, what happens to it (sent to third party, stored indefinitely, etc) also greatly increases or decreases the risk factor.
Maybe other existing cases already cover these details, but I thought it might be worth bringing up how different the rating would be for each, despite falling under the same language of “proof of your age is required to access adult-only content or features”.
That’s why I would do it this way. This proposed case in my mind only covers that prove is required and a second point about types of which data collected gets also added to each service. These cases already exists like the bio-metrics one mentioned above.
So this case - > proof is required (neutral)
Case about biometrics - > for services that do face scans. (Bad)