Pornhub cuts off more US users in ongoing protest over age-verification laws
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
A header is trivial to add, trivial to verify is active and the legal liability is then shifted to the parent as it is for everything else related to their child.
I disagree. It does not have to be perfect, certainly not in the first pass given that right now there is no working solution at all. It just has to cover most of the popular web clients on phones and tablets to cover the small children. With time devices and web agents can iterate through improvements.
In terms of bypassing, teens will bypass it but they can just visit sites that a database would never be enforced on in the first place. Many teens today know a myriad of ways to bypass restrictions for porn, drugs, pirating movies and games but that is a different issue all together. Trying to fix this for teens will just splinter the internet even more and will not accomplish anything.
By requiring any site that has adult or user-generated site to add a header any client or government can verify that header is in place. If not they can be reported and the company fined after the implementation phase / period is over.
The current solution does not even exist. Creating centralized databases will clearly just lead to endless lawsuits and just divides of the internet per state which is nearly impossible to enforce. That only benefits feeding the starving lawyers and VPN providers.
I am not underestimating anyone. If a kid is curious enough and smart enough they can bypass anything just as their older teen peers. I would suggest if a kid is smart enough to know what they want to watch then they can probably handle the content or just go to one of the many sites not using the centralized databases as their older teen peers would. That of course should be a discussion between them and their parents. Maybe Usenet will make a come-back by the demand of clever children.
If a kid is not ready for said content and they still bypass it then it should be on their parent to educate them and/or discipline them as with anything else between a parent and child. If it is leading to problems then social services will sort it out as they would with any other parental issue. People must not accept going down this dystopian route of building a centralized ID and even more censorious technology that could easily be extended to any content, not just adult.
[Edit] I should also point out that most tablet and phone OS's support having child accounts. Child accounts can not install any applications.
You can't shoot down proposed solutions on the basis that they aren't perfect unless you actually have a perfect alternative.
Until these blocks cannot be overcome by typing "free VPN" in to Google, they will remain toothless.
Parents have the keys and vehicles in easy access to the children but by and large it's not a problem.
Interesting that despite actual deaths occuring as a result of this norm (when kids do take the cars and crash), we haven't added a law that that only opens the car on a fingerprint scan or some shit, which is effectively what this is equivalent to.
If DEATH doesn't justify such draconian measures then porn most definitely doesn't
It looks like you refute your own argument here. We don't highly regulate automobile access because it's not an issue. Most kids don't have a desire to steal their parents cars, so why would we regulate that? Many kids do have the desire to access things that may harm their development. So you can see why your analogy is largely nonsensical.
Seriously... You dont know what you're talking about.
The vast majority of auto thefts are children taking the family car unauthorized, including well below the age of a learners permit.
Then the therea the class of theft referenced with Kia Boys... Literally teenagers and preteens stealing cars with USB cables....
Go look at reality first before you try to tell me what it is.
Taking this point even further: you mentioned the consequence of this apparent grave problem is death. How many people actually die every year from the grievous problem? I can’t find any deaths caused by kids stealing their parents cars personally, but I’m sure you’re aware of thousands. You must have some good numbers here as I doubt many deaths go unreported.
Did you even try to look?
First result is literally "Boys, 6 and 3, Crash Parents' Car While Driving to Toy Store".... Do I need to continue or can you use Google yourself?
My proposal is for the government itself to do blind age verification on their own site and issue an expiring token scoped to the user's IP. The porn site would load JS from the gov site or from its own servers that pops up age verification prompt loaded from the government site, gets the signed token to be verified by the porn site.
What the government does to verify age is up to them but my approach would be to verify that they have a valid payment card or a mobile phone number (verified by sms code) where the screenshot of their ID matches whoever is an adult part of the phone subscription plan. Ideally, verification is done once and all you do is login.
I said blind verification because you can have it so that the gov site doesn't know from what site the verification is requested. This can also be applied for social media and other restrictions.
You all can disagree ideologically but this happening. I think it's best to discuss how to do this in a way that respects the privacy of users without allowing middle parties to abuse it.
If we removed the legal mandate, we could do this with voluntary industry support. MindGeek owns not just PornHub but tons of other sites -- if they said "We'll publish this header; dear Mozilla and Google, please support/ build parental controls that check for this header," then most other mainstream porn sites would join in too.
People shouldn't have to tell the government they're going to read a (dirty) book, and they shouldn't have to identify themselves to porn businesses.
Libraries and book stores can and do ask IDs for adult books (less so these days). Same thing.
They should identify themselves to the gov, porn sites should only get prood of a succesful identification without identifying users. The gov can id you but it shouldn't know what sigtes you visit. That way your privacy is protected.
> Government mandates are never going to get some sites to comply
They can force US sites and fine/prosecute. The rest, they can order ISPs to block them for non-compliance.
> If we removed the legal mandate, we could do this with voluntary industry support
The industry has had decades of pleading from child safety advocates. It's like saying tobacco companies should be trusted with tobacco warnings and working with store owners on making sure minors are ID'd before a sale. Many in the porn industry strongly feel any teenager should be able to watch porn and many more believe people can get porn anyways so there is no point. They have faced lawsuits and investigations and many countries have been banning them for a long time over this concern so your reasoning that suddenly they will voluntarily work with browsers makes little sense to me. Perhaps the gov can have some working group under FTC to come up with a tech thar enforces the law and porn sites can work with it and i see no problem including browser makers but at the end of the day just like any id verification system, someone has to be responsible for the verification.
Where my idea deviates is that I believe the gov should be responsible for enforcing it's own laws and public key crypto can effectively split the responsibility of verifying age and making sure only verified users have access.
I'm firmly in the "porn and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race" camp.
We require actual age verification for tobacco and alcohol. I don't see a reason not to require the same for porn.
That said, I am interested in the most effective ways to keep tobacco, alcohol, and porn out of the hands of minors.
1. I'm not convinced that it is markedly worse than other harmful content which is now widely available on the internet.
2. I don't think efficacy should be the primary consideration. For instance, mass censorship is rather effective, but clearly unconscionable. I'm not sure if you can make a cure which isn't worse than the disease.
Images of consenting adults is a far cry less offensive and damaging than parables and stories explicitly stating girls should be fed to rape crazed mobs in order to protect "special guests", amoung many other horrors....
Get out of here with that faux feminism bs
LOL.
Kids will do stupid things and test their boundaries - they will drink , smoke weed and have pre marital sex - best to do is that you as a parent have instilled some values and advice how to do it responsibly.
You just walk up and the cashier eyeballs you and if you an obvious minor but then you get a friend that plays sports to buy it - just seem like a silly liability waiver for not getting sued when Timmy DUI's and wipes out somebody.
What country do you have in mind specifically? I live in a non-puritan country (Poland) and we absolutely need to produce the ID.
Anyways, I never had to produce ID when I bought alcohol and cigarettes while I visited Poland.
(short version - puritanism was a movement that orignated on the British Isles, and spread to the US from there. It never ever made it to Poland).
As for the original issue - once it's visibly obvious that you're over 18, nobody asks you to produce your ID. The only exceptions are automated (self-service) tills.
From your link: "Puritanism was never a formally defined religious division within Protestantism, and the term Puritan itself was rarely used after the turn of the 18th century." - that makes it extremely unlikely I meant it literally, don't you think?
As for the original issue - I wasn't over 18 back then and it was very visible.
(Am I following your argument correctly?)
And 2023 has been historically bad.
Mass murderers are mentally unwell and feel isolated from society.
Both of which are correlated to porn abuse.
> A header is trivial to add, trivial to verify is active and the legal liability is then shifted to the parent as it is for everything else related to their child.
No, you just said the web site is responsible for publishing the header, which means they have legal liability.
Does HackerNews have "user-generated content"? Does it have to publish the same header as Pornhub?
And as you later write:
"In terms of bypassing, teens will bypass it but they can just visit sites that a database would never be enforced on in the first place."
Exactly. That's also from the article:
"In its Twitter statement, Pornhub alleged that a major problem with these laws is that states "are not regulating enforcement." This means that major platforms like Pornhub will likely comply with the laws voluntarily—or else risk fines of up to $1 million annually, the FSC estimated—while users seeking to avoid age verification will simply migrate over to seedier platforms that don't require ID and often pose security and privacy risks to users."
IOW, it wouldn't work and would just be a way to go after mainstream websites that ran afoul of a politician.
I can see the difference. Website has the liability for not adding the header.
Parents have the liability for not “enforcing” checks on devices a child might use.
It’s a clever proposal but more details will need to be thought through.
The other solutions puts technological hurdles, additional points of failure, and liability on cooperating sites that will push away legal adult traffic from them to seedier sites.
I think the internet is moving towards assuming everyone is a bad actor by default and you’ll need to verify your identity with government issued ID to prove you’re a good actor. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if we end up needing accounts verified via government ID to participate online in a meaningful way.
This is already proposed in the UKs Online Safety Bill. Countries such as Australia will immediately follow as our e-safety commissioner froths eroding the privacy of Australian citizens.
Seriously, it's pretty much the same shit.... Except cars actually kill people...
My understanding is that the whole point of federally structured statehood is for each state to do unpopular things like this and people move to where they want. The one thing that should change is for the federal government to stop supporting states unfairly. The federal tax revenue and population of a state should be the deciding factor on how much money and infrastructure support states get. For example, internet access itself should be state subsidized not federal. the federal government by law should force states to support its policies like this if it means subsidies and investments like rural interner access. The price for being left alone while they ban books an random things for their politics should be having to pull their weight. For conservative states like missisipi and arkansas that are dirt poor, they should look to texas and florida who are capable of pulling their weight while coming up with crazy laws. The only serious matter of contention is immigration which I won't touch with a 10-ft pole now.