Comment by thinkingtoilet
7 days ago
We require people to verify their age in person to access pornography, it doesn't seem like that far a stretch to require it online. You can't even by a ticket to an R-rated movie without age verification. That seems reasonable to me. I see I'm in the minority here. I understand the slippery slope argument but if we succumb to that then nothing could be done anywhere ever. I understand this could be abused, but it's up to us to make sure it isn't. I think that's why people don't like it, it requires diligence and effort to keep things sane. Much easier to just allow children to view content they absolutely shouldn't then be politically active and make sure our laws are sensible and our representatives are held accountable.
I understand this could be abused, but it's up to us to make sure it isn't
Exactly, by protesting and fighting laws like this.
What exactly do you want people to "make sure of" with the law in place? If someone is concerned about this law, what specific action should they be taking in the name of "diligence"?
Having a law saying children shouldn't view pornography isn't abuse. It's common sense. Just like saying a 12 year old can't legally buy weed. Is that a slippery slope? Should 12 year olds be able to buy weed? If not, why is that not a slippery slope and this is?
What needs to be kept in check is the scope. Let's say they try to age restrict sites that are subversive, but not obscene. That's what I'm talking about.
Having a law saying children shouldn't view pornography isn't abuse.
"Children shouldn't view pornography" is fine as an overall goal. A law that suggest the content providers track the faces and passport details of all users is a ridiculous way to fail to prevent that however.
It is however a great way to have an readily accessible log of exactly which citizens are viewing content the government finds questionable.
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It's up to the people who WANT age verification to ensure that it can't be abused rather than up to US to prevent it from being abused after the fact.
Invoking the "slippery slope" fallacy when the country with the greatest military in the world is abusing public records to grab people off the street and out of court rooms is an interesting choice.
I don't follow the argument. Why isn't it up to the people who want strict privacy to ensure that it can't be abused by porn providers?
"We're passing a law that gives the porn provider industry a bunch of PII that could be abused, it's up to YOU to make sure porn provider's don't do anything unethical with that data."
How do you not follow the argument that there are problems with this?
With in-person access it’s easy to do two things:
1. Verify the ID without storing it in your system. Someone just looks at it.
2. Visually confirm that the photo on the ID matches the person entering the building.
Neither of these apply online.
Has everyone forgotten how kids operate? They’re not clueless. They’re going to realize that they don’t need to submit their ID. They just need to submit someone’s ID.
At first they’ll just use fake ID generators and submit those photos.
If that loophole gets closed somehow, a market will appear for buying ID verified accounts for trivial prices. People will create ID verified accounts and sell them cheap for side money. The only way around this is to start storing ID information for every account to make sure IDs aren’t used multiple times.
It’s one giant slippery slope of consequences for the adults forced to submit IDs, while the people who want to work around it do so trivially.
Right. Just like kids would hang out outside a 7-11 and ask someone older to buy them a Playboy. Or pay a homeless person to buy them beer. Should we remove the age limit on alcohol purchases because kids aren't clueless? That's not a rhetorical question. Should we remove all laws that can be abused? Your argument falls apart very quickly.
Your analogy needs modifying. If we remove the laws, a child could walk into the store and buy beer with their pocket money, no questions asked. This isn't the same as them browsing the internet no questions asked.
The child is not paying for their devices or internet access. Their parents are paying and providing the needed equipment. In a way, it's like giving keys to after hours access to the local mall, where all kinds of stores can be browsed including adult magazine stores, without any shopkeeper to apply the laws.
So one solution is don't give kids the keys. Or, since their online activity leaves a digital trail, even if they did have keys, there's a chance to moderate their activity via seeing what they have done rather than police where they might go.
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The Internet itself is the loophole in this analogy.
Minors shouldn't have unfettered + unsupervised access to the Internet, that's the solution.
The open Internet isn't a kid friendly place, isn't meant to be, and won't be no matter how many laws you pass.
Children grow up to become adults, and spend most of their lives as adults. It's important to weigh the lifetime cost of safety laws.
A child with unfettered access to the Internet at say 8 years (IMO, way too young should be 15+) is only protected for 10 years. Then goes on to spend ~60 years negatively impacted, fighting ever growing censorship and risking extortion/blackmail when data leaks. It just doesn't seem worth it in this case.
I'd much rather laws mandate special child-safe phones/laptops that could only access a subset of the Internet, rather than forcing every website/app to collect PII and inconsistently enforce age verification for all visitors for all time.
And all of this is besides the point anyway. Social media and cyberbullying are the real threats to minors online. Porn access isn't good, but it's not causing suicides and mental health crises left and right.
These laws aren't just about porn sites though. They affect sites like Wikipedia. [1]
You don't need to verify your age to enter a bookstore or a library.
And if you really want to control who can access porn then the only way to do that is with a whitelist filter on the device being used. These laws are onerous without being effective.
I do think a standardized requirement for commercial websites to have content rating meta tags (like the existing content=adult and content=RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA) would be a good thing though, just to make more lenient filtering easier.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-65388255
For age verification for a R rated movie, the movie theater does not copy your passport and match it with your IP address.
At minimum they should have tried for a digital attestation and not "send pictures of your official identity documents to every site" approach.
Well, they didn't take that approach.
Read the actual guidance. They in no way require "send pictures of your official identity documents to every site".
There are a bunch of ways (some advisable, some not) where an existing entity that knows you are an adult can extend just that -- we know they are an adult.
Credit card providers know all their customers are adults, for example -- because you have to be an adult to enter into a credit agreement. And credit cards are insured.
Mobile phone companies in the UK block adult content by default and have done for some time; you have to unblock it by telling them you are an adult. But once you've done that, adult content can be verified quite trivially with an SMS.
And there are other methods still. For example a site with longstanding members is allowed to estimate the age of members based on how long they have used the same email address!
It's not a porn filter. It's a set of rules for companies to follow to identify adult users.
Is it the best law? No. But it's not the Texas law, that's for sure, and that law has survived a US Supreme Court challenge.
Sure, but if they don't already know they have to ask to see ID or try the video estimation stuff, right?
That's a lot more data leakage than some central authentication for it, and PII going to more places. And it's very optimistic to assume implementations will be good faith and secure.
I'm not sure I would call the USC a mark of quality right now anyway.
Worth noting that most UK ISP's already require age verification from the bill payer to turn off the adult content filter.
So this is a new filter on top of the old.
I don't see a world where this won't be abused.
Maybe by the authorities, furthering policies already in place to deal with people who don't toe a certain line of thought.
Probably by people outside the law, who now have a fantastic system to relentlessly attack. A place to source identity information that can be used for almost any part of a criminal enterprise, from buying credit cards to selling new names to carry.
And when security of government systems fail, in a way where damage is irreversible like this case, it is... Rare... To see fair outcomes.
I know all the other comments are massively disagreeing, but I'm relieved to find I'm not completely alone.
It's not even that I think this is a good idea, but it does seem a fairly standard extension of existing laws. Potentially I'm missing something? Everyone else seems to be enraged by this.
I'm pretty sure you're not alone: studies show that a median of 31% of the worlds population support authoritarianism(1)
(1) https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/02/28/who-likes...
Hmm, assuming you're not just being imflamatory, I definitely wouldn't identify as supporting authoritatianism. Perhaps that's not for me to say, we live in a world where environmental protesters are often labelleed authoritarian, and people who I'd have thought would identify as facists call themselves libertarian.
I think the bit that I don't understand yet, is: - Most people are not arguing that all pornography should be accessible to all ages - Most people seem horrified that online pornography isn't accessible to all ages
I think that the second point is a miscategorisation from me. Reading the rest of the comments, people seem more up in arms about the introduction of government tracking into a space where it previously wasn't (obviously commercial tracking already happens a lot in that space, but I don't think that justifies having even more).
I think I need to read some more on the implications of these kind of laws, I suppose I don't really understand too well what the relationship between government tracking and age checking is.
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I think the biggest difference compared to in-person ID checks is that I've never had to take a picture of my ID or face for an in-person check. Some bouncer or other person takes a quick look at my face and my ID, and that's the end of it. I don't have to wonder if there's a picture floating around forever of my face and ID, because none got taken. For such physical interactions, I'm thus less worried that all that information is getting stored in some database that's inevitably going up be leaked.
Honestly, if the way this worked was that you could head over to the Pornhub office and get unlocked access from the bouncer at the door, that would probably be preferable.
> Potentially I'm missing something?
The problem is the surveillance and tracking, not the age verification itself.
Yes, I think you're right. Some of these other comments seem to imply that age-verification would involve taking a photo of your face, giving your full name and having that stored permanently in a database.
I have no idea if that's true, but if it was, I'd be massively concerned about that (compared to non-phased about the general idea of age-verification)
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Why don't we just require kids to price they're an adult before accessing the Internet then? The issue with these laws isn't the goal, but the implementation is fatally flawed. Do you think websites like Worldstar are going to implement age verification? Of course not, no foreign site will. Then the next step for a law like this must be censuring all of those sites across the country.
Who defines what should be censored? The law certainly doesn't; it's purposefully vague to give the most latitude possible to the implementers. There's already been cases with the new UK law where peaceful arrests were censored by the law due to "violence."
VPNs exist, proxy websites are easy to setup, and frankly parents need to take some ownership.
Two alternative laws that'd have been much better: a) Require ISPs to provide a child friendly Internet gateway that would blacklist large weather if the Internet without a login. And b) legally require websites to accurately describe the content on their page and it's age appropriateness in headers sent back to the user, so the ISP or end device can decide whether to age gate a website.
These are much better solutions, the burden on websites isn't so onerous (many small sites have already had to shutdown due to the burden of the UK law). Implementation is distributed, preventing a single state actor from having full control of a censorship machine. Parents are empowered to decide what content is okay for their children. And you don't have to upload your fucking ID to use the Internet.
People who support this crap need to stop believing politicians every time they say "think of the children!"
> and frankly parents need to take some ownership.
This. None of this is the state's job, it's 100% on the parents to educate themselves, their children, and be the responsible party for determining and controlling what their kids can or can't do with technology and the internet.
If the state feels like they need to do something, they would be better served providing education and tools to parents. Hell, for the really tech illiterate the state could just offer a managed MDM service that they could enroll their kids devices into if they really can't figure out parental controls themselves.