Age Verification

Instance Variation

Age verification laws that were previously announced by the Australian government have recently been rushed and passed through. These new laws will require that social media services such as Nexirift (and by extension, Nexirift instances) verify the age of their users before allowing them to use the service.

Safety

The Nexirift team is committed to ensuring that the service is safe for all accounts. Unfortunately, if we want this service available in Australia, we will to follow the new laws otherwise we may suffer legal repercussions or other actions that force us to not operate within Australia. This might mean that you will have to provide a form of identification for your account to Nexirift instances.

Toggling

We understand that some owners of instances may not want to have this feature enabled (and to be honest, we don't want to either). You can toggle this feature on or off by editing the features.age_verification.enabled value in your instance's configuration file.

This is a bad idea

It has been shown that the Australian government has not provided clear guidelines on how this law will be implemented. Will users be required to upload identification documents such as passports, driver's licenses, or birth certificates? If so, who will be responsible for ensuring the safety of that data? The government, the website, or a third-party organisation? Regardless of who controls your data, these new laws pose a significant risk to your digital safety by forcing you to provide identification for your account. This infringes on your right to privacy, as you can no longer remain anonymous online. Websites and organisations you interact with will be able to identify you. If the government insists on implementing this law, they should manage the verification process, not businesses. Allowing businesses to handle verification could lead to data breaches and is a severe violation of your privacy. A better approach would be to use app stores for age verification instead of individual services. This would prevent services from identifying and tracking users. Ultimately, we believe this law should not be implemented under any circumstances.