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Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

There’s such a strange dichotomy in these conversations.

1. Porn shouldn’t be available to kids and it’s on the vendors legally to ensure that.

2. Porn should be unrestricted, it’s up to parents to do something about it.

What I can’t understand is if the people in camp 2 are so unashamed of the porn advocacy then why is age verification such a big deal?

If it’s not a big deal then verifying your age shouldn’t phase you anymore than verifying your age to buy alcohol. If it is then you know exactly why kids should be kept away from it.

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Because when buying alcohol, you can for the most part (outside of online purchases, but even then the courier can check an ID upon delivery hypothetially) verify it fairly easily. With online porn, the scale and complications doing it put a much bigger burden on the providers.

Additionally porn has a much bigger stigma than alcohol, so keeping record of what you watch, especially if you're into something more niche connected to your name can be used to discredit political opponents or even single out certain group due to abuse of power. A good example would be exposing a conservative politician that watches gay porn. Not that would necessarily be a bad thing, but there is no equivalent to this with alcohol - oh you drink tequilla, but you're whole ideology is based on drinking whiskey...

> With online porn, the scale and complications doing it put a much bigger burden

This could be very easily done at the ISP level for the whole connection. (I'm talking best effort not a perfect implementation)

Why not just block all "Adult" content by default and allow the buyer to opt in (both temporarily via password, and permanently).

Then it would be a decision each household could easily make about what they want.

edit: I love the downvotes without rebuttal. Reminder that the downvote in this community is not "I disagree with you"

Aside from the implications of turning an ISP into a decider of what you get to see rather than being a "dumb pipe," what about parents who want to view porn but don't want their kids to? Should they be forced to choose between 20 years of abstinence or potentially exposing their kids?

The "household" is a pretty bad level at which to have to make these decisions, given that people of all age ranges share the same household. It seems to me that age verification makes a lot more sense than this, (and ftr I think Utah's bill is ridiculous overreach and would have massive privacy implications that are highly problematic).

> what about parents who want to view porn but don't want their kids to

That was specifically addressed in my post. Temporary disable.

Remember that safe guards dont have to be perfect before being implemented. They just need to be better than the status quo. The status quo right now is 10 year old kids viewing porn and thinking that's what average intimate loving relationships look like.

Yeah the temporary disable isn't my complaint. That's not the worst part. My criticism is the system in place after the parent has made the choice. As a parent, do you choose your own freedom or to protect your children? Most will choose the latter and basically have to choose "abstinence" for themselves for many years. It's a pretty sucky choice to have to make given that such an artificial and unneccesary choice is being forced on them by the legal system and their ISP.

My point was at the moment of choosing they could either open the entire connection to $CONTENT or open the device (MAC address, DHCP assigned IP) up (afaik most ISPs control the router too) for traffic to those sites.

What I'm suggesting does not require abstinence from those who have the password.

Maybe I'm daft but how would ISPs be able to control it? Solely based on domain name? What about porn intermixed with other content on sites like reddit?

> (I'm talking best effort not a perfect implementation)

Correct. The first iterative step would be to simply block the big obvious domains and sources escalating the arms race. It will never be possible to keep 100% of porn out of your kids' hands, but just like alcohol, cigarettes, and getting behind a car we can setup a better starting point than "Do you promise you're older than 18/19/21? YES/NO"

It's a bit absurd that providing alcohol to minor is punishable by a fine, but we give the internet/porn industry a free pass. Also if you were to hand out porn to a minor you'd probably be hit with some kind of charge (inviting a minor to some sexuality), but the Porn industry is handing it out en masse without any repercussion

The iPhone already accomplishes this pretty well in my experience. You can go to Screen Time > Content & Privacy Restrictions > Content Restrictions > Web Content > Limit Adult Websites. It blocks everything, including porn subreddits.

I assume they use some kind of regex to do this, and it works.

I recently bought age restricted materials online and had to upload a picture of my photo id with a selfie to a 3rd party verifier. Similar to what crypto currency verification goes through.

I think the underlying disagreement/debate is whether or not these initiatives are in good faith. Any implementation of this is going to be imperfect and a motivated person will probably be able to get around this. So the debate, I think, is, if we implement this are we going to incrementally improve it? Or is it just a pretext to point to and say, hey look, this can never work perfectly, so we should ban x, y, and z.

Good faith is insufficient for me and what I would expect are a majority of users (not speaking strictly about porn, social media is coming under scrutiny with similar proposed solutions). Many good faith actors experience data breaches, often from internal attacks.

I think it would be difficult to find a majority of people who support minors having unrestricted access to pornography and shock content. The sticking point seems to be in the implementation details and true intentions of the people behind the initiatives that gives people pause.

2. I don't want to live in a permission society where I have to submit to inspection to do anything.

If it’s not a big deal then verifying your age shouldn’t phase you anymore than verifying your age to buy alcohol.

I don't like that either and some years ago I stopped providing my ID on request. Corporate vendors (eg supermarkets) still insist on asking my birthdate. I'm in my 50s.

Paternalistic attitudes infantilize society and that's a lot more shameful than most porn could ever be. Absent specific reasons to believe abuse or exploitation is taking place, lawmakers need to stay out of other people's business.

> I don't like that either and some years ago I stopped providing my ID on request.

How does this work with picking up prescription medication?

The only time I've been asked for an ID at a pharmacy was for non-prescription sudafed. I've picked up many prescriptions for myself and my family, and they have never asked for ID.

Same, I pick up prescriptions for myself, my kids, and my wife, all the time. I can't recall ever being ID'd, and I'm certainly I'm not usually asked for ID. Maybe it varies state-by-state?

They only ask for ID if you're picking up a controlled substance.

It depends on the drug (and maybe the state).

I have to show ID for a couple of prescriptions I have, and my understanding is that it then goes into some kind of database that gets cross-referenced between pharmacies to make sure that I don't have multiple prescriptions at multiple pharmacies.

I think that came about as part of the opioid crisis, because some people would have 5 different doctors write prescriptions for the same meds to 5 different pharmacies. No one had a way to detect that someone was getting 5 oxycontin prescriptions.

Funny enough in my small town - I walk into the pharmacy, they ask the name and birthdate of the person for whom I'm picking up the meds (generally my kids), I pay and leave. On the other hand, at least for a while if you wanted to buy Sudafed (OTC) at a grocery store, they would ask for ID and write you down on a paper list. ???

For controlled substances like ADHD medication they do ask for ID. I think for most people the only controlled substance medication they get with any frequency is Sudafed, so that tracks. (For the record, I’m pretty sure “controlled substance” and “Rx required” are separate categories)

They do this because pseudoephedrine (Sudafed) is commonly used in illegal production of methamphetamine. This has been a common practice since the mid 2000s, iirc.

I was addressing the requirement for alcohol sales, for which prescriptions are not required. I am not too hot on pharmacists requiring ID for everything either, the prescription is its own documentation.

"Paternalistic attitudes infantilize society"

It's not 'paternalistic' to require people to pass a driving exam, or gasp, do a safety test to buy a gun.

This pseudo-liberatrian crap is the most toxic part of HN, and frankly what is 'infantile'.

I have a number of nephews and nieces now and completely emphasize with my brothers and sisters who don't want to allow you and others to infect their kids with your supposed 'ideals' willy nilly - it's a cesspool out there.

At minimum parents should have choice.

We can be smart about it and provide anonymous tokens to validate age, it's not even hard, we just have to think about it, it should have happened long ago.

I'm not saying that there should no regulations, or anything even remotely like that. I'm saying that I object to having to ask people for permission to do the most quotidian low-harm things that people have been doing for millennia before this country was even founded.

> At minimum parents should have choice.

Parents absolutely have a choice and always had it. They can always enable the adult filter in their internet box or on the devices they give to their children. Expecting the whole internet to implement sound age verification because they can't be bothered to do such a simple thing and instead need the state to nanny the other 80% of the population - that's actually infantile.

> If it’s not a big deal then verifying your age shouldn’t phase you anymore than verifying your age to buy alcohol.

If the cashier asks for your ID when you buy a six-pack, that's completely ephemeral, with no record created. If they swipe your ID (I think this happens sometimes), that creates a record, but it's not clear if it stores personal info or just verifies that it's a valid ID with appropriate birthdate.

If you verify your age to view online pornography, there's no way to do so ephemerally, at least that most people would trust. I think most people who oppose these types of rules wouldn't have a problem with showing ID at an adult shop to buy an adult DVD (but I could be wrong).

"there's no way to do so ephemerally, " - there are ways people can be issued anonymous tokens, 3rd party verifications, regs against recording the data with strong regulatory authority.

Frankly, it's not even that hard you could come up with 3 'good ways' just by thinking about it a tiny bit, that would be less intrusive than showing your ID at a bar.

Trade this for getting the drinking age lowered to 18 and we win.

I didn’t claim that it’s impossible to imagine ways that this could be done. I was pointing out that no such methods are actually in common use, which means that when people think about validating their age online, they are concerned about their privacy.

There is a technical possibility to do that. There is also a technical possibility to leak identities.

Sure, there are ways. There are ways to watch every single American all the time; China is trying that with their citizens already. Doesn't mean we should, or will, or that it will ever make sense.

PH is a business, and the overhead of adding this system, on top of the PII, compliance, and access risks that come with it, doesn't make business-sense.

What costs more? implementing a sweeping system with tons of risk, or blacklisting one state?

The overhead of adding a decently designed and broadly used age verification mechanism is almost nil. It won't show up even as an operating expense.

> If it’s not a big deal then verifying your age shouldn’t phase you anymore than verifying your age to buy alcohol. If it is then you know exactly why kids should be kept away from it.

This is very different. When I buy alcohol, the guy at the checkout looks at my ID picture, checks the DOB, then we move on with the transaction. Digitizing the process changes so much.

Will porn websites be required to provide an audit trail to regulators to verify compliance? Will providers need to send your ID to a third party provider to verify authenticity? What security and privacy guarantees are in place? What is to stop another Ashley Madison style leak from outing gay Mormons in Utah?

"We do it in analog, so it will be fine at scale in digital" is not an argument I would expect on HN.

> What I can’t understand is if the people in camp 2 are so unashamed of the porn advocacy then why is age verification such a big deal?

a) It's economically implausible. Age verification is very expensive, and the requirement means that many sites that currently permit adult content will ban it rather than pay for verification (Twitter bans sex workers in Germany rather than pay for verification).

b) It doesn't work - it just pushes audiences to pirate content, because pirate sites don't give a stuff about verification, and don't take down content of individuals distributed without their consent, and steals from content creators.

c) It's not safe - there are multiple instances of systems being breached, which can put the safety of performers and other groups at jeopardy.

d) It enables incredibly bad legislation from political groups who are not benign.

OTOH what actually does work is to not give your 8yo kids unfettered and unsupervised 24/7 internet access, but the comments here whenever this topic comes up would suggest that's far too much to ask of HN parents, nevermind the average parent.

an extension to a) is also that there is non-trivial risk.

PII breaches require disclosure, and that's the last thing PH wants. There is also potential legal ramifications if they fail to handle the PII correctly and stuff gets leaked.

Then there is the risk that somehow a kid manages to get through anyway, and they face the risk on that angle -- angry parents and crusading politicians.

Furthermore, how are you verifying these? Actual human eyes? Image recognition for valid Utah driver's licenses? What if they live in Utah but are from out of state? Fake IDs are a thing, and if it's an uploaded image I could have easily whipped up something with Photoshop when I was like ~15. Compress the image a little to help mask any artifacts and then cry "potato quality phone camera" if anyone questions it.

Opens up a whole can of worms that don't make sense if you're trying to solve this on the scale of just one (1) state. Maybe if California, TX, and NY go in on it, too, but otherwise it's a lot of risk for little gain.

The ol' "if you have nothing to hide" argument was flawed a century ago and it isn't getting any less wrong. Recognize that "age verification" is 100% about taking control out of individual hands and into the government's.

The only reason we do this with alcohol is because of health and safety risks. Please tell me how boobies threaten the fabric of society?

Boobies are great, useful, and oftentimes beautiful. Yes, the US can be a bit puritanical but porn is hardly just boobies.

Premature exposure to sexual content is thought to be deleterious to a developing brain. Sure, kids mature at different rates but what should be formative years might instead be spent in navel gazing porn addiction which can lead to developing a taste for evermore strange, fringe, and or violent self gratification or acting out of fantasies and disrupted socialization. Instead of going out and figuring things out, why leave the house when you can get your fix(es) in the comfort of your own room.

Yeah, it’s a judgement call but one I’m comfortable with. Kids have always figured sex out just fine, we don’t need to throw nitroglycerin on already raging fire in the way of ever increasingly fringe/violent/illegal unlimited free sexual videos on demand. You can read up on Reddit about people addicted to porn and how empty of shells they feel like, childhood is the wrong time to introduce this fuel to that fire.

Don’t worry the porn owners can learn to code.

Kids have had access to porn on the internet for at least 25 years now. I don't know how harmful that has been but the premise that this is somehow a new situation is pretty absurd.

>What I can’t understand is if the people in camp 2 are so unashamed of the porn advocacy then why is age verification such a big deal?

When marijuana became legalized in my state, you had to verify your age and they wrote down your ID in a book. It quickly went away because its draconian as shit. I'm not ashamed to buy weed or alcohol, or look at porn, but I still don't want to create a written record every time I do it.

I also generally don't agree with the moral panic that conservatives want to generate about porn. Most kids see porn and have since porn was produced. It's on the parent to, you know, be a parent.

These laws have nothing to do with protecting children and everything to do with social control.

We're talking about a state that imprisoned a women for being topless around her children. These people are dangerous and want to enforce their fringe world view on everyone they can.

>I still don't want to create a written record every time I do it.

What I couldn't understand about this scenario (regardless of the product being purchased) is... how does it possibly get tracked? Like can't I just drive across town to the other grocery store and buy more cold meds there? How on earth is the state (???) collecting and reconciling paper records in the 21st century? The likely answer is that they aren't, but someone who wrote the law was certain there had to be an audit trail...

You seem to underestimate the power of OCR. Or even more probably, the standards around any type of controlled thing. Buy yourself a copy of the NCPDP Telecommunications Standard if you want to see how prescriptions for controlled substances are electronically handled.

It's databases all the way down, me hearty.

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