Quote Originally Posted by Patrikyyz View Post

Unless you have expressed consent from the surfer to collect the information, I don't see an everyday surfer popping his info into an "adult site" that he hasn't even joined yet...not knowing where the info is headed and to what end...With identity theft and the like, just lurking around every corner...

I will would not provide my personal info online to enter adult site that I am not yet a member, so I'm not sure that I could expect potential customers and surfers to do the same on mine...
The cool thing about some of these developing open standards identity solutions is the surfer never gives information to the adult site at all... in fact, other than for chargeback reasons, the surfer would never even have to give the information to the billing provider. The idea is there is a trusted third party (similar to domain registrars for the domain name system) that verifies the identity of the surfer, and that trusted party authenticates the fact that the surfer is of age, and if payment processing is required, potentially the third party can actually facilitate providing the card info to CCBill, without even CCBill knowing the identity of the surfer.

There would be multiple identity registrars and a common DNS-like registry that would point to the responsible registrar for a given person's identity verification.

I don't understand all the ins and outs, but it sounds like a very solid system that can't be monopolized by one company (which is why Microsoft Passport was such a flop) and since the registrar is bonded and accredited by a standards body, there's a degree of trust that isn't there if the info is just given to some random adult site.

The end-to-end solution doesn't exist yet, but all of the pieces are there, and the identity verification functions potentially work for almost all of Europe, the US and Canada. I'm hoping that some of the vendors working on the technology will be able to convince Epoch or CCBill to invest in making this possible, I think it would be an excellent self-regulation move by the industry, and serve the needs of helping to keep underage surfers out as well as reducing fraud.