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Comment by dudul | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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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