In a blog post this morning, Seattle City Council member Tim Burgess says that adult services website backpage.com (owned by Village Voice Media) is wrong when it claims it can’t screen out people exploiting child prostitutes:

Village Voice claims that proper online technology doesn’t exist to screen ad buyers like they can at the offices of their print publications. But that’s not true.

While Village Voice Media claimed last month that in-person age verification systems are unrealistic and that it will pursue other online verification, Burgess insists the company can and should use “services like PayPal that have accurate and reliable protocols in place to verify the identity of the person making the payment and their bank account details.”

(Since folks tend to ask when we post on this subject: The Stranger‘s online classifieds require in-person age verification for anyone placing or appearing in an escort ad.)

3 replies on “Tim Burgess: Adult Service Website Should Be More Like PayPal”

  1. As much as I don’t like adult websites, seriously, PayPal is not a secure system people, not any better than Google, even in the “are you an adult” checks. Anyone willing to give their bank account information away is setting themselves up, it’s a growing risk and crime to steal this information. To curb such a problem as child prostitution is really much more complex, no one has done well in preventing it anywhere else, so why are people focusing on one venue? If you really want to curb child prostitution, here’s a rather revolutionary idea, let them get real jobs if they want, seriously, not a cure for the problem but it would help even though people cry about children working here for some reason. Honestly I have not thought about this issue much so I don’t have any other solutions, but attacking a website for it, that’s scapegoating, a serious problem in the US lately, but seems to be a bigger problem in Seattle lately to.

  2. His blog post also makes clear his target is requiring all sex workers to make their true identities available online to law enforcement if they want to retain access this worldwide advertising resource. Which, if the vast majority of grownup sex workers are his target, fine, but best to be upfront about that, right?

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