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Comment by skhunted | Hacker News Reader

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They're not saying age verification is wrong, but dozens of skeezy sites taking in personally identifiable information who should have no business in taking in personally identifiable information is a bad idea.

Pornhub advocate for devices to do authentication of ID (i.e. Apple has FaceID and a bunch of stuff for reading IDs already as part of their digital ID initiative) and then attesting the user is of age. This could remain entirely anonymous and more secure than a kid inputting his dad's drivers license number that he stole from the dad's wallet.

Sure, that’s reasonable. Let’s implement this. In fact Pornhub could have implemented this on its own and staved off the “need” for a government imposed solution. It knew there was a problem and did nothing.

That would be a device level change. Pornhub doesn’t own Apple - they’re two separate companies.

What problem?

Obviously children viewing hardcore porn on Pornhub’s sites.

Do you have any evidence that this was a problem?

Providing access to hardcore porn to people regardless of their age is a problem.

It's not a problem unless you're a puritanical retard. It's actually one of the things that makes life worth living, like guns and liquor and trucks.

We don’t let children buy guns, drive trucks, or drink liquor. I suppose we are all puritanical retards.

Then don’t visit dozens of sleazy sites if you don’t want them all knowing about your porn habit.

Or better yet, end your porn habit.

I am going to make an interpretation that you think age restrictions are good public policy in general, and asking why others disagree. In the edit you say that "we all appear to agree that age verification is an acceptable goal", but I would disagree with that.

I find age restrictions to be good public policy in general if-and-only-if the target of the restriction has a clear cost that is shared socially. Abuse of tobacco products and alcohol has a clear link to medical health care and the government is responsible to fund health care. The link between tobacco and cancer is an established fact. Alcohol has a more fuzzy link with poor health, but I suspect it get less fuzzy regarding children.

The research that links porn and health is very much in dispute, similar to research that links violent movies and crime. At best it is inconclusive. Some countries has age restrictions on movies, others do not. There is also research on violent music and crime, violent games and crime, and the quality of all the research seems to be beyond poor. I do not think its good policy at all to construct laws using those.

My conclusion is that governments should not make laws without having good ground to stand on. Until the quality of the research improve I find it better to let parents and schools determine when a specific child is mature enough to view specific media, be that movies, music, games, porn, or any other media.

The vast majority of the people I've interacted with don't think hardcore porn should be viewable by children. Those who disagree and welcome to advocate for changing of the law in this regard. It is indisputable though that age verification laws regarding porn have been in place in the country for many decades. The internet is not special in that such laws/social mores do not apply. Such is my opinion.

In my country (Sweden) we do not have a specific age restricting law regarding purchasing porn. What we do have a generic law that forbid any film in cinema and TV broadcast from being viewed by children under 7, 11 and 15 years old if viewing that film is considered harmful for that age group. What is harmful is then delegated to a government department of censorship.

A funny thing however is that the department of censorship was closed down in 2010, being at the time one of the worlds oldest with a creation date of 1911. With the closure, the above law has no longer any practical effect but the cinema industry and TV broadcast still volunteer to honor it to some degree.

Historically, the department of censorship focused mostly on violent movies, but a famous examples was the cartoon Darkwin Duck which was deemed too violent for viewing by children. Teenage violence was often connected back in the days with violent scenes in specific movies.

Public support for government censorship is currently in minority. The vast majority of people seems to think that publisher, cinema owners, parents and schools do a better job in deciding what should be viewable by children. Occasionally a specific film or game jumps into the news (like GTA 5), but they tend to die down fairly fast. Porn discussions also pop up once in a while, but they die down similarly fast since support for a return of government censorship is really low and the political parties generally know this.

The only specific law about porn we do have is displaying of porn towards people without their consent in a way that can be seen as off putting. This target behaviors like people sending nudes to others without their consent.

That's a potentially reasonable argument, however there are a couple of issues mapping from the physical precedent to the digital world. In the physical world you would show your ID to the store clerk, or (more likely) not even be asked for ID at all if you were sufficiently old-looking.

In the digital world, everyone has to show proof of age, as there's no quick sanity check. Further, none of these states have a privacy preserving way of demonstrating age. All of them require either passing payment details or identity details to an intermediary or the website. The recipient of the identity then gets to hold onto whatever details you provided for the rest of time, and may use them for stuff like ad targeting. This is in an industry that is well-reputed for being scammy.

I literally cannot remember the last time I had to show proof of age to buy tobacco or alcohol. I'm middle aged - mid 40s, in fact - and places don't ask.

If I order alcohol, the reason I'm showing ID is to prove that yes, it was me that ordered it instead of someone else (and I'm showing my ID at the liquor store).

I've only bought porn twice - once a video and once a magazine full of naked men. I didn't get carded either time and this was back in the 90s. One of those times, I was 17.

And if I needed to verify ID online (for payments, etc), I have a secure way of doing that, which folks in these states simply do not have. The websites don't need to keep any information on file either. And this is the very thing that pornhub is objecting to. If they were rolling out age verification that already has some of this in place, it'd be a different story.

And a sidenote: I don't think it is all that wrong for a 17 year old to see what naked people look like. The rest of us need to be mature enough to make sure that young folks have a reasonable view of porn, including things like 'this isn't realistic and physically difficult for these reasons." A lot of so-called 'harm' is simply that we - the adults in the room - haven't held up our end of teaching.

I'm middle aged - mid 40s, in fact - and places don't ask.

Your appearance is the age verification. One can obviously tell you are of age to buy the products in question by looking at you. That’s the age verification.

Communities are permitted to determine what constitutes age appropriate materials and at what age those materials can be consumed. Such standards ought to apply to web content too. There is nothing special about online that indicates it should be exempt.

I may be in the minority, but the community does not raise my child. I do. As such, I will talk to them, set our family’s standards after consultation and monitor appropriately. If it turns into a discipline situation, I have no qualms about going there. Or if it turns into a praise situation, I have just as few qualms about going there.

Government regulation cannot and will not replace parenting. If government regulation worked, groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving would not have to exist.

Moral is - talk to your kids. If porn is too hard to talk about, you weren’t ready to have children. It’s time to start building relationships with trustworthy adults who can talk about porn, sex, consent and all those other wonderful things with them. Because guess what dude? If parents don’t, someone will and their intentions may not be good.

Communities set some standards of behavior. This has been always been true. While the government doesn’t replace parenting it does enforce standards of conduct. Like requiring parents to feed their kids or preventing businesses from selling porn to your child.

If government regulation worked, groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving would not have to exist.

MADD is precisely the kind of community action that is successful. They made people aware of a problem and government stepped in to help provide a solution. Drunk driving fatalities were reduced as a result.

…you weren’t ready to have children.

Lots of people are ready to have kids and have them. A healthy society tries its best to prevent such kids from suffering too greatly from the misfortune of being raised by a moron. A healthy society tries its best to prevent morons from enticing kids of good parents such as yourself to do things that are harmful. Hence we try to keep people from selling drugs to kids. We don’t have 100% success at this but this isn’t a valid reason to not try.

I might be too cynical, but when I see governments roll out initiatives like this, all I see are campaign slogans.

Meanwhile, we’ve got kids living in poverty or in foster houses of horror and those topics don’t get the same attention.

In our family, porn is a gateway topic for us to start talking about issues like revenge porn, sexting and all that other stuff that is right around the corner for us.

So this is a tricky one for me and I guess I don’t understand why porn is so important. Its existence is helpful for me because of the topics it can help bring up, but we talk about everything from periods to child birth so I know that’s likely rare.

I’m maybe trying to impose my attitudes too much on others so I just can’t understand. I apologize if I’ve been obtuse - I am so I don’t really have an excuse. :)

> I literally cannot remember the last time I had to show proof of age to buy tobacco or alcohol. I'm middle aged - mid 40s, in fact - and places don't ask.

I'm older than you and I'm carded every single time I buy tobacco or alcohol. The policy on showing identification varies widely depending on region, both due to the actual law and store policy.

Anectdotes are not data, but I am carded once in a while and I’m older than you.

Typically because there are incredibly poor laws around retention and use of private information collections and I typically loathe having any company retain my personal information without a really good reason (and this isn't a good reason).

> It is already the case that for the most part whatever we do online is known by some third party entity. Online privacy is essentially dead and has been for many years. I’m not implying this is good or desirable but that it is just the reality of things.

This is a very defeatist point of view. It is still possible to choose not to share the majority of your online activity with third parties.

Online privacy is essentially dead for people who don't bother maintaining it.

My online privacy is still largely intact, and I will do my best to keep it that way.

You think it is still largely intact but what you do is monitored.

This is a parenting issue, not a government issue.

Verification maybe? I don't like the idea that a porn website could tie my real identity to the watch history (I assume you have to be logged in once you verified) and sell that to whomever.

According to TFA they don't oppose age verification, they oppose the required method of age verification, namely submitting personal information and IDs.

They say they would support secure verification, I guess like having a digital signature from an authority, like the government.

I wonder if PornHub is doing anything to help this happen, though. I doubt it...

They do oppose age verification because despite knowing there was a problem of underage people viewing their content they did nothing to stop this. Now a government solution has been imposed they are acting as if they are now some how a responsible business.

I don’t know the answers or the right way to implement things but age verification is not an unreasonable requirement.

No one is putting my name and date of birth into any database when I am buying alcohol.

I've found some places require an ID scan to sell alcohol. No exceptions even if you're obviously 65 years old.

Maybe you're right, but in the real world I'm already getting multiple letters a year from companies that have my PII and have had an unexpected breach. The issue isn't policy, it's implementation.

We have a few different things going on here. First, age verification requires sharing a lot of PII with some of the dodgier companies on the web. Pornhub’s business past is shady…and they may be the least shady of the lot. Second, things like gay rights aren’t a solved problem. The most awful fact in all of this is that people can be killed for watching gay porn in many countries. If a country changes its policy dramatically, porn sites will have a database of people who have watched gay porn in their country.

When someone physically checks my ID, I can be reasonably sure that it’s not going to be in a database. You could do age verification without a database, but it would be one hell of a lot easier with a database. And again, we’re looking at some of the dodgiest businesses on the web.

No one wants to give their ID card and real name for despicable things like this.

Even the show people in the industry cover their faces

> No one

Hahaha, you would be shocked.

Strawman. PornHub doesn't argue against age verification, it criticizes the poorly designed implementation.

Showing my ID at the liquor store to buy alcohol is not comparable to having to put my ID and PII in a poorly secured database. Databases that get breached again and again with virtually no consequences for the owner.

Sadly this is a feature not a bug for the lawmakers who wrote the laws. They want databases of PII to be breached in order for porn consumers to be publicly named and shamed without the political blowback or getting their hands dirty.

The first thing that would happen is that the breach would be scoured for politicians names. They’d be just as vulnerable to this kind of blow back.

So for example if you were known to have paid for sex with a porn star, your political career would definitely be over. Right?

Or how it never turns out that politicians who pushed for persecution of gays are gay themselves. Ever.

I suspect that scouring would find approximately 535 congressmen and 200 million americans.

seriously, how much "blow back" could there possibly be to revealing someone has frequented PH?

The question isn't so much does a person look at porn, it's more what porn do they like. If pornhub is storing the personal information, it could be matched to specific videos, which if it's at all fetish-specific could be blackmail material.

I’m sure they are thinking of certain colleagues to expose. That is why they passed the law. The kinds that could be threatened into compliance with rank and file.

And future congressmen too. Jeffrey Epstein was known for playing with this kind of power.

Same with prostitution and Nordic model. Porn is a bad thing, we ban it by prosecuting consumers.

Pornhub could have implemented age verification a long time ago and didn’t. It didn’t suggest such a thing despite knowing underage kids were viewing their content. Now they try to act all reasonable. They aren’t a victim in this. They waited until a political solution was imposed to propose reasonable steps to combat the problem.

I’m all for reasonable solutions and don’t know the best way forward. I do know there is a problem with kids viewing content on these sites and I do know that these sites don’t care about that because none of them ever tried to do anything to prevent this.

Do you really think they give a damn about privacy? If they care so much about privacy, wouldn’t they also be proclaiming how their website doesn’t track you and gobble identifying data? Or is it they are just hiding behind that argument because it sounds noble and their real concern is a business one?

Also, how secure do you think the state systems are that provide those ID’s?

>Databases that get breached again and again with virtually no consequences for the owner.

Pornhub is gonna have a hard time using ”our database is gonna be hacked” as an argument.

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