An Adult Verification System (AVS) also known as an "Age Gate" is a computing system used by a website to confirm that the user attempting to access their website is of the age required (usually by law) to view the website's content, which typically includes sex, nudity, violence or profanity, or Entertainment Software Rating Board rated content
The system is used to attempt to legally protect companies from punishment under laws against (for example) Disseminating pornography to a minor. These systems often use a credit card, and are usually provided by a third-party company; the same AVS company can provide adult verification for multiple websites, thus becoming more user friendly.
In 1999, a particular AVS (Landslide Inc.) was at the center of a police crackdown on internet users viewing child pornography, known as Operation Ore, in which web users using an Landslide's AVS were identified by their financial records when the company which stored the data went into liquidation.
Problems with this system include the ease at which a child may get access to (for example) their parents credit cards, defeating the stated purpose of the system, and that it is easy to use a fake script to defraud users into divulging their credit card number to an individual to use for their own purposes.
Famous quotes containing the words adult, verification and/or system:
“Love stories are only fit for the solace of people in the insanity of puberty. No healthy adult human being can really care whether so-and-so does or does not succeed in satisfying his physiological uneasiness by the aid of some particular person or not.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“Science is a system of statements based on direct experience, and controlled by experimental verification. Verification in science is not, however, of single statements but of the entire system or a sub-system of such statements.”
—Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970)
“I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments ... but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)