Comment by landl0rd
2 months ago
If the only thing that verifier does is verification for accessing digital pornography, it remains blackmail-able. Not in the sense of identifying the specific content accessed but in the sense of "this user has gone through the steps to gain access" which is, frankly, good enough.
After verifying the ID, there is no reason the verifier needs to know to whom a token belongs, which would help this. It doesn't need to be repudiatable in practice because the security risk of a leak is near 0 and nobody ages backwards.
The solution to that is to make sure the age verification is used for a variety of different purposes.
For example, why not use the same age verification system to block access to sites that advertise or sell alcohol or tobacco products? Or sex toys. Or dating apps. Or loans applications. Or for any number of adult-only apps that aren't necessarily blackmailable? Normalize age verification for adult-only services.
That provides people with plausible deniability. “Oh, I wasn't looking at porn! I was just trying to find the perfect brandy to buy as a business gift.” or “Oh, I was just trying to get a quote to refurnish my apartment on credit.”
I'm against this because 1. of chilling effects and 2. it risks solving the sybil problem, making it easy to e.g. restrict people to one account.
> Normalize age verification for adult-only services.
Lets not, please.
Normalization like this could absolutely invite overreach / abuse. The immediately/obvious one is now sites have a "this is/is-not a minor" data point to correlate with the user activity that they'll sell off to some advertiser/broker.
I don't recall where I heard it, but the quote was essentially "the perception of surveillance is itself restrictive."
Threatening someone to tell people “There's a high likelyhood that X watches porn” is a blackmail-worthy threat IMHO.
Unless you have access to someone's specific kinks or routine (how often does he/she watches porn, for how long), you're no going to scare many people.
Facebook has these information by the way, thanks to the “like buttton” scattered everywhere (at least for people who don't browse porn in private mode, but having done IT support in college, I can tell you there are many people who don't).
Is it though? In this day and age I would think that someone who doesn’t watch porn is in the minority, it is like saying this person has sex.
On the other hand what kind of pornography, or how frequently and so on could be social pressure , same as what kind of fetishes or kind of sex or with type of person/gender, most people aren’t that sex positive to talk openly about.