With that in place we can easily make beer, liquor, marijuana and tobacco sales on the internet possible! And porn too, I guess.
I think some of the aim of these bills is to shame people into not consuming vice.
If they though they'd get away with it they would mandate public lists of who does these things.
It may get tricky if sites limit registration to unique keys, but so long as it's purely checking with a third party and not storing your info, they're shouldn't be a way to validate an id is used more than once.
Imagine how much better the web would be if cookie consent was a browser protocol on top of HTTP headers. This is the Obviously Correct solution, they just needed to work with browser vendors to make it happen.
I’d rather you have websites support a generic cryptographically-secure claim schema for ages (implementable in any signed token the browser can emit) than actually check everyone’s identity.
Imagine how much better the web would be if the browsers would have a built-in ability to accept or reject cookies on a per-site basis... oh, wait, they do. And had that since forever (or at least IE5). Almost no one used that because it was obnoxious to have a popup on every website. So browser vendors moved those settings to the farthest corners of the most obscure configuration dialogs... and then the politicians brought those prompts back (but in a crappy, non-standardized, not-even-working way).
The idea was that core functionality shouldn’t break if you block unnecessary tracking, which the old cookie blockers couldn’t achieve, which was why politicians got involved in the first place. Great idea, terrible implementation.
This is a great idea, and it doesn't seem like we need lawmakers to do anything about it. If browsers implemented this, websites could start using it right?
Also the sites have a disincentive to make it easier; most people just click through because it’s annoying. The sites want you to do that; they don’t want to make it easier.
> PornHub said that a better solution is to identify users by their device.
Fingerprinting is not and should not be the sanctioned way of identifying people. On the engineering side, it is a horrible hack. On the ethical side, it is much worse to (attempt to) fingerprint since it tells PornHub waaay more than just age.
If I understood PornHubs proposal correctly they want to only provide the content if your browser does not send a "Child-Mode" flag or something. Given that parents should introduce children to their first mobile devices and guide them, setting this flag seems not to be so hard. Just set at account creation "minor: true" and done, or am I missing something?
Most other developed countries get by just fine with a much more relaxed attitude. Demanding identification and legal documentation for every little thing is excessive and imposes a compliance burden on everyone. It's fair in the sense of being non-discriminatory, but unfair in the sense that it creates a massive aggregate burden, reduces privacy, and institutes authoritarian presumptions.
If the person manning the self-checkout operations thinks you look awfully young to be buying alcohol then they can always demand to see your ID.
Simple.
Far more harmful is self-checkout without a discount for free labor or treating your customers like criminals when they leave the store with their own property.
You seem to have missed the part where I do not want to ask permission of the government for every little thing. I'm well into middle age and do not appreciate having to seek governmental approval for what I consume. I am fine with some products like alcohol being subjected to taxes to balance out negative externalities. I am not fine with the idea of showing my papers on demand.
When I was in (secondary) school in the UK, we could get served beer in the pub at lunchtime while wearing school uniform! Doesn't get much easier than that!
I'm much older but I think 16 is old enough for a beer. I didn't when I were that age but I don't begrudge them their beer.
And it's not like the law will stop it from happening anyway.
I have seen this with several European friends who relocated to the US and found their relationship with alcohol turning dark.
My personal theory is that life in the states may be on average more stressful than in Europe, perhaps due to lack of healthcare, at-will employment, etc., and this life pressure causes people here to be more at risk of self-medication problem drinking.
Using your UK credit card? If so, that's an age check in itself.
Also they normally aren't free to use, each query normally cost money, why would the porn sites want to pay for a service they didn't want anyway.
Another issue with these system: They are high value target and they tend to be just as crashy as other government IT projects.
> Hit the SELECT TAG button, then copy and paste this META tag into the header section of every page on your site that includes content inappropriate for minors:
> <meta name="RATING" content="RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA" />
So far so good...
> by using the label you signify that you agree to our TERMS AND CONDITIONS.
...uh, what?
I'd rather support a different implementation released as an open standard.
Queue the full Tinderization of online interaction, I only want to see coments from X race, Y age, Z height with following list of orientations and identitites.