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:
“Even though I had let them choose their own socks since babyhood, I was only beginning to learn to trust their adult judgment.. . . I had a sensation very much like the moment in an airplane when you realize that even if you stop holding the plane up by gripping the arms of your seat until your knuckles show white, the plane will stay up by itself. . . . To detach myself from my children . . . I had to achieve a condition which might be called loving objectivity.”
—Anonymous Parent of Adult Children. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 5 (1978)
“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)
“Fear, coercion, punishment, are the masculine remedies for moral weakness, but statistics show their failure for centuries. Why not change the system and try the education of the moral and intellectual faculties, cheerful surroundings, inspiring influences? Everything in our present system tends to lower the physical vitality, the self-respect, the moral tone, and to harden instead of reforming the criminal.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)