We are actually hosted in Finland at the moment, but this law affects me as a UK citizen providing services to other UK citizens. A few ideas have been brought up that I'm going to look into around moving lemmy.zip as an entity outside the UK, or refusing service to people in the UK.
Unfortunately it's not really clear at the moment. I'm hoping it will cover us, and by enforcing our T&cs we're fine. However they may be requesting age validation. At least making it 18+ puts us in the right direction for now, and worry about the rest in the new year. There will be some way around it.
I believe it's technically part of this law, although there is some reference to it from a 2017 law. Not that there's much more than a pop up on most websites (As I'm lead to believe 😇)
8.54 Following our November 2023 Consultation, Ofcom included proposals on highly effective age assurance (‘HEAA’) in the December 2023 Consultation on our guidance for service providers publishing pornographic content on their online services (‘Part 5 guidance’). Age assurance proposals were also included for U2U services in our May 2024 Consultation. However, our expectations around HEAA will not be finalised at the time we publish these Illegal Content Codes of Practice for U2U services.
8.55 Therefore, rather than delay the introduction of the safety defaults measure, we proposed in our November 2023 Consultation that we should initially introduce the measure with a stipulation that services should only be in scope if they have an existing means of identifying child users, whether that is a form of age assurance or another method.
The HEAA guidance isn't yet published, and neither is the risk assessment documentation, so we don't actually know what type of category we'll fall in to yet to even make the decision LFGSS made. Admittedly they are a magnitude larger than lemmy.zip and probably fall higher up the risk assessment than us.
It also doesn't apply if there isn't already an age verification process in place (until the above HEAA guidance is published)
Yeah, further evidence that the UK government is incompetent.
Maybe (hopefully!)
Once the risk assessment is released and I've had chance to scour 1000+ pages of guidance, it is possible. It was a thought in the back of my mind, yes. Will have to look at the wording, and USA is still COPPA i believe which is 13+, although I need to do some research how that works regarding NSFW content
Yeah, turning off NSFW also kills the ability to have image spoilers, interact with art communities, and work with any community that uses it for things like content warnings instead of adult entertainment. Not something I'd want to do.
Unfortunately the scope of this law is for any site offering a service to a UK resident (completely unenforceable and written by insane people) and i have the misfortune of living in the UK so it doubly applies to me.
Suggestions for setting up a company in another country do sound appealing to get around this though, but sounds costly.
Absolutely, but then they've lied instead of us willingly offering a service. It's not the perfect solution by a long shot, but it's a step in the right direction for now
I don't disagree that's it's not highly effective, but Lemmy doesn't have any other built in tooling for this and in order to move in the right direction, with the lack of tooling, moving to 18+ only is just a step in the right direction.
There's over 1000 pages of guidance, and of ofcom haven't released their risk assessment yet, so things should be clearer when that is available - for now, I feel it's important to at least not offer a service to under 18s if we can't guarantee they don't look at NSFW content.
I will also add that their "effective" methods are not reasonable for small independent sites, and the whole act shows a complete disregard for an independent Internet.
The problem is we currently provide services to under 18s, with a toggle that allows anyone to view NSFW content. You're absolutely right, there is no way to verify that currently, but the least I can do is protect the site going forwards by saying you have to be 18 to sign up, because there are no additional checks around age. That would then put us on par with an adult entertainment site at the moment (if/until mandatory age verification is brought in) in terms of someone would have to confirm they are 18 to enter.
I'm certainly not a lawyer, but that seems to move us away from anyone of any age signing up and me saying I'm fine with it. Until there is a solution in place software wise, it seems easiest to say we don't provide services to children and they shouldn't sign up here.
Yeah, its insane. They expect this to be done by every website providing services to UK users. The overreach is just mad. And completely unenforceable too.
I imagine many UK sites will go down that route, especially with how many Mastadon servers there are in the UK. I'd be up for doing that if it was feasible (financially and technically).
Yeah, geoblocking myself doesn't sound the smartest idea, luckily VPNs exist and i can look into other ways to bypass it. I think I need to do an admin recruiting session as well.