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Comment by greggsy | Hacker News Reader

Credit card verification?

Being able to produce a credit card number and transaction has nothing to do with a user's age or the stated goal of the law, protecting minors.

16 year olds can get credit cards

Credit Card APIs I believe have Age/DoB or something.

Edit: No they do not.

Man, I hope that by paying for something with my credit card I'm not giving the vendor that much access to my information. I kind of assumed the point of a credit card was to be a third party and put me at less risk, not more.

No, they do not.

TIL! Thanks!

IIRC, the legislation that's being passed in red states defines age verification as the service provider being provided with 2 pieces of valid government photo ID

This seems to be the specific legislation: https://legiscan.com/TX/text/HB1181/id/2819916

It requires a system where the user:

(1) provide digital identification; or (2) comply with a commercial age verification system that verifies age using: (A) government-issued identification; or (B) a commercially reasonable method that relies on public or private transactional data to verify the age of an individual.

Unclear to me what the transactional data means, and if a charging a credit card would suffice, but it does not require 2 forms of photo ID.

PH could implement that, they just don't want to.

Most people don't even have two forms of photo id in the US. Usual identification for jobs involves deeds/bills (no photo), pay stubs (no photos), social security (no photo, usually), and birth certificate (no photo).

The only major form of photo ID is a state/driver's license and passports and I think only 30% of the US has Passorts. It's such a big country that you can reasonably never require it and still travel more than the average EU citizen.

You can also fill out a form with your employer to get a photo form of employee authorization, but you're Sol of you're freelance/gig economy.

Yeah, if they wanted to massively violate their user’s privacy. Fuck that.

Theoretically they could sure, it would just be expensive, labor-intensive and put them at risk of criminal penalties if their process failed or broke down. Also the number of people willing to send their ID to a porn site is very small so whether they complied or not, they will not be getting much traffic from Texas. Its "impossible" from a common business sense perspective, not a theoretical perspective.

> Also the number of people willing to send their ID to a porn site is very small

Not saying you’re wrong (I certainly don’t have any data to the contrary), but this isn’t intuitive to me. Don’t tons of people send their credit card (which is linked to their SSN) to PornHub? From there seems like a small step to also send ID?

Your credit card issuer is not sending your SSN to merchants when you swipe.

Most Pornhub users aren’t paying ones, or even logged in at all. It’s all there publicly, unless you want to leave a comment or whatnot.

Not usually. Porn sites tend to use a 3rd party payment processor to manage funds (often sites dedicated to working with adult sites). So you don't get Pornhub on your billing statement, but something like Probiller or whatever.

I'm certain those people are a minute fraction of the total userbase. They are intentionally trading privacy for greater access.

As I said, they could but they don't want to. You said there is no way for PH to verify ages the way the legislation demands, but that plainly isn't true.

>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Few things are truly impossible or 100% correct. There's not much value in arguing such extremes.

When it comes to legislators demanding changes to technology, many things are impossible. This isn't one of them. It's only cumbersome to their business model; boo hoo..

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