PC Gaming Giant Valve has begun to bow to Britain’s online security law by demanding Steam users to verify their age with a credit card to access games with mature content.
“To access Steam Store pages for mature content games as well as their affiliated community nodes, you must be logged into an active user account and explicitly sign up via the Account Settings page.” Steam’s support page information. “For British users, this opt-in process requires age verification. Your British Steam user account is considered age verified as long as a valid credit card is stored in the account.”
The Online Security Act stems from a goal to prevent children from seeing inappropriate, sexually or generally mature content across a myriad of online platforms and services. As such, users of services and sites that host mature content, although not only have to check that they are 18 years of age or older.
Often, this requires things like a facial scan or credit card information that privacy centric people may be concerned about separating, given verification tools can be delivered through third -party organizations with their own rules for data collection and use. In particular, a credit card is asked as you must be 18 years of age to apply for one.
“Having the credit card stored as a payment method acts as a further deterrent to bypassing age verification by sharing a single Steam user account among several people,” Valve noted.
Although I understand the need for such verification and hope that it will protect young people from some of the more tasteless content you can find online if it is inclined, as a 38-year-old steam user, it is a minor annoyance and another obstacle to jump when logging in to the game platform on different PCs or devices.
It is also a little annoying as there are still people who do not have credit cards; For example, I only got one that I actually spend back last year.
Protecting privacy
For people like me who can be a little unstable in providing credit card information, Valve’s process is to get the credit card stored as a payment method so that it does not use an off-platform third-party verification service, which should mean that your credit card information is kept secure.
“The processed data in the verification process is identical to the millions of other steam users who make purchases or store their payment information for convenience,” Valve said. “Therefore, the verification process provides no information about a user’s content preferences for payment providers or other third parties.”
So this makes me feel a little more comfortable with it all, and hopefully should be a one-and-done process. I have become so used to how easy steam is to use from making a secure payment to logging via the mobile app, so I hope this adaptation to the online security law does not erode that feeling of ease.
It will be interesting to see if other countries are following Britain’s example or whether the valve decides to roll such verification for all users and a one-stop-shop way to give ‘secure’ access to mature content. I assume time will show.
