User:Domino/Age Verification Q&A

Why are we doing this?

The reality is that the risks of children coming into harm's way interacting with strangers are far greater than they were when Dogcraft first opened its doors. As the server's owner and operator, Rendog remains liable should something terrible happen to a child playing on Dogcraft, and the implementation of an age verification system was deemed necessary as part of the risk assessment carried out by him.

Ren requested we introduce an age verification measure to provide him peace of mind beyond reasonable doubt that the implementation of our 18+ minimum age rule would be effective.

The server being public and free to play opens it up to a lot of potential for harm to happen. The unfortunate reality is that running a server is a very dangerous world as it provides a vector for serious harm to come to players if something goes wrong. We believe in our Moderation team and community, but we've had to introduce this extra step to both provide peace of mind to Rendog and reduce the risk of exposure that vector provides.

How does this protect Dogcraft’s players?

Our objective here is a system that can carry out player age verification accurately, so we can trust that our user base is of the minimum age to play on our server, giving Ren peace of mind, which is integral here. It's a difficult one to understand, and we get that. From Ren's perspective, it's been a case that a risk assessment needed to be made to continue running a Minecraft server. If anything were to happen on the server, it would directly affect Ren’s main source of income and livelihood and by making an effort to enforce the 18+ minimum age, we greatly reduce the risk of that happening.

Is this necessary or just an attempt to get on the official Minecraft server list?

Rendog requested we introduce an age verification measure to provide peace of mind beyond reasonable doubt that the implementation of our 18+ minimum age rule would be effective. We have no interest and gain limited benefit from unlocking a badge on the FindMCServer website.

What about my privacy?

Dogcraft will not collect or have any access to any personal information. This includes your face scan; GamerSafer will not store your photo directly; only as irreversible abstract biometric data points. The only information we get back from GamerSafer is an age category (child, teen, adult) and a confidence rate in that category (high, medium, low). GamerSafer is a reputable company who partners with Mojang to run the official Minecraft Server List and already works with other Hermit communities to help ensure player safety.

Dogcraft also does not pass GamerSafer any data, such as your Minecraft or Microsoft account. During linking, your Dogcraft and GamerSafer accounts are linked, nothing else. During that process, Dogcraft doesn't find out what your GamerSafer account is - we receive a unique account ID from GamerSafer, only used to tie your GamerSafer account specifically to Dogcraft. (So, for example, if you played on both Dogcraft and VintageBeef's servers, both would receive a different account ID from GamerSafer)

This page goes into more details regarding privacy related questions, but if you want the gist of it, this answer is that.

Why wasn't this announced sooner?

This question is very important for transparency right now, but a couple months after the world launches, it will likely be moved onto a different page for permanent residence.

We wanted to make sure we got this implementation right, and have spent the past two months investigating in great depth various measures we could use to implement the task given to us by Ren (being to implement a verification system). We wanted to be specific, and detailed in our communication with this - rather than announce inaccurate information early-on.

Unfortunately, we only settled on GamerSafer fairly late on in this process after a lot of work exploring other approaches. For most of July to November, we were investigating a different method using patreon. The switch to using GamerSafer occurred in November when it became clear that the patreon verification method wouldn’t work out. (It was only announced to the staff team on December 3rd)