The Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection (ASACP) is pleased to announce SenseMakers as its newest Title Sponsor.
ASACP is a nonprofit organization that has promoted online child safety for 29 years. The association proactively protects children from online harms by fostering corporate education and encouraging responsible operations. This effort is made possible by the financial support of leading brands, companies, and groups such as SenseMakers.
ASACP’s family of sponsors is highly regarded for their ethical business practices and for implementing procedural and technical measures to safeguard the innocence of youth. These measures help protect minors and sensitive viewers from accidental exposure to age-restricted materials as they live their digital lives.
Initially launched in 1990 as a telephone-based service, SenseMakers has gradually built its platform (www.thuis.nl) over the past 35 years into a live one-on-one online gathering place uniting models with their fans.
As part of this evolutionary process, the company has focused on the privacy and security of its users.
“We see it as one of our responsibilities to ensure a safe experience for everyone using our platform,” said a company spokesperson. “For example, we protect the privacy of our customers and models alike to create a safe place to converse online.”
Key to this is knowing its clients and customers, so SenseMakers is proud of its extensive KYC procedures, which, in part, prevent underage performers from participating on the platform.
“We verify our models using digital and manual identification and enforce the use of personal bank accounts under the model’s name,” the spokesperson explained. “We do not pay out to other bank accounts and will reject models attempting to join our platform that do not adhere to our policies.”
As a demonstration of the company’s corporate and societal responsibility, these policies go over and above the minimum requirements of the law.
“We do not allow any model younger than 20 years old to participate on our platform,” the spokesperson revealed. “While 18 years of age is the allowable minimum in our Netherlands home, we think this is too young and are contemplating raising the minimum age of our models to 23.”
The company takes steps to help ensure that the models who sign up for its platform are the actual models performing on it. For example, SenseMakers recently built an AI solution that captures X-vectors from a model’s facial features to guarantee that the person using a verified account is the one who is authorized to use that account.
Using established facial recognition technology, each pixel of a facial image is assigned a vector that points to the nearest edge pixel. These vectors’ X and Y components detect the center of the eye and corner of the mouth, enabling identity matching based on facial features.
This method, along with the company’s use of the Restricted To Adults meta-label, is an excellent means of helping preserve youth’s innocence while aligning closely with ASACP’s strong principles of proactive corporate leadership and responsibility.
“Sponsoring ASACP is a great move for us as we try to protect minors,” the spokesperson concluded. “We are doing our absolute best to prevent children from visiting or participating on our site and will implement more measures as we become more familiar with the methods of online child protection.”
ASACP’s Executive Director, Tim Henning, sincerely thanks SenseMakers for its generosity and leadership in sponsoring the association and for becoming part of its ongoing success in keeping children out of and away from age-restricted materials.
“We are incredibly grateful to SenseMakers for helping the association shape a safer future for children online,” Henning stated. “The company’s commitment to child-safe operation helps us make a meaningful impact!”
The association provides free resources and tools for parents and the industry, but such offerings would be impossible without its sponsors’ generous support.
These tools include Best Practices tailored to specific adult market segments and a comprehensive Code of Ethics for all website and mobile app publishers. These vital resources help empower companies of all sizes to prevent minors from accessing age-restricted content.
ASACP’s most notable achievements are its RTA meta-labeling system, which prevents children from accessing adult-oriented web pages and apps, and CP Reporting Tipline, which has received and processed more than 1.25 million reports since its inception and remains a vital global resource.
“Our sponsors provide more than financial support to the association. They provide an enormous wealth of experience and operational insight that enables ASACP to better advocate for more effective, yet less intrusive, child protection measures,” Henning concluded. “SenseMakers’ three-and-a-half decades of doing business and the lessons the company learned during this time will provide the association with an invaluable source of expertise. Its sponsorship is a total win-win for us both!”
To learn more about how your business can help protect itself by protecting children, email tim@asacp.org.
