Oh yes, "simply" obey a law that would not respect the privacy of people, and given the current religious zealousness in the US, may expose customers to future danger.
Good for Pornhub. They made the right call.
Good for Pornhub. They made the right call.
Especially in rural areas, some of those wingnuts would like to go back to the days where you can lynch people you do not like.
Other than the wingnut faction pushing this legislation, I think some hope for a deterrent effect for minors as well as adults. They are wrong to expect any kind of deterrent effect of course.
How does age verification break privacy? I have to show ID to get into an adult "bookstore," to enter a bar, or purchase alcohol. I have to show ID to check into my hotel, get through airport security, drive my car, buy Pseudo. Are you saying there is absolutely no way to perform this action online in a way that respects privacy just the same as all of those operations? No way at all to do a verification that's immediately tossed in a privacy preserving way?
If so, then it sounds like maybe things that require age verification shouldn't be allowed to operate on the internet.
And even if the private sector innovated here, there's no approval from the government to accept math nerd solutions as legally valid.
Which means you basically have to scan and upload your photo ID to these websites, or use a payment card, or something else that will stand up in court.
At least with all the porn bills I've read, it's illegal to retain the information.
By the way, Pornhub actually has a preferred technical solution involving "device attestation". It's only marginally better than the snake oil the AV industry wants to use, and I don't like it, but they have said they'd stop objecting if something along those lines were standardized.
They just don't want to have to deal with a patchwork of mutually incompatible stuff (a) that's totally ineffective, (b) that leaves them either handling everybody's ID or dealing with questionable contractors to hold it, and/or (c) that leaves them having to convince the users to trust them or those questionable contractors with those ID images.
It doesn't actually. Third party zero knowledge attestation works just fine. Think through the cryptosystem. It's possible for an authority to verify an ID for a given name and target site without revealing the former to the latter of the latter to the former
And maybe it was, considering the history of porn regulation in the US. If you look at the requirements and contemporary rhetoric around 18 USC 2257 (yes, the thing that basically all legit porn sites with US operations have a disclaimer for), it was pretty blatantly intended to render the porn industry unable to operate. Porn producers were never actually intended to come into compliance, but rather presumed to be unable to (due to the ridiculous procedures and the supposed omnipresent use of underage, undocumented, and coerced performers).
There was and is a fairly coordinated program of shopping this around to various legislative bodies (not only US states). It started maybe two years ago, I think. It didn't just catch on organically.
Some of it seems to be driven/funded by the AV companies, who presumably actually want the verification to happen. But a lot of the legwork and political contacts are provided by organizations that would definitely love to drive every porn site out of business. I doubt they expect to get all of them, or even all the free ones, but, sure, somebody like NCOSE knows that it's a major burden, and absolutely thinks that any damage to adults' access to porn is a positive feature.
It's not obvious that most of the legislators who vote for these things understand the implications at all.
So some of the people you could blame for this legislation definitely have such intentions, but probably not all of them.
> If you look at the requirements and contemporary rhetoric around 18 USC 2257 (yes, the thing that basically all legit porn sites with US operations have a disclaimer for), it was pretty blatantly intended to render the porn industry unable to operate.
Hmm. I'm ready to believe you, but 2257 doesn't seem totally infeasible to comply with in a VHS world. Dangerous to the performers, yes, because it requires tons of people to keep records of who they are and where they live, and those records are pretty much guaranteed to leak and be abused. An expensive nuisance, also yes. A chance to hound anybody who messes up out of business, and threaten them with prison, OK. Obnoxious overreach, sure. But totally impossible to comply with? I'm not sure about that. It actually seems easier than user AV.
The thing that always really got me about 2257 was that the claim was it was supposed to prevent another Traci Lords. They checked Traci Lords' ID. She showed ID. She had a real driver's license (based on a fake birth certificate, but it was the state that was supposed to check that, and anyway it was presumably a good fake). As far as I know, 2257 wouldn't even have slowed Traci Lords down.
I'm not saying that it was supposed to be impossible to comply with per se, but rather that it was supposed to be impossible specifically for the porn industry as anti-porn crusaders imagined/alleged it to be at the time. There was a bunch of drug-war-like rhetoric about how porn had become more violent, exploitative, and outright criminal since 1970, when the previous government commission on the subject reported that porn wasn't an important social problem and should not be restricted for adults.
https://zkdocs.com has some protocols described, if you're curious to learn more about this space.
I think you're severely underestimating the efficacy of traffic analysis and correlation efforts.
PrivacyPass is a better starting point, IMHO. The Cwtch developers (Open Privacy) even implemented PrivPass over Ristretto255, which is objectively awesome.
So the user would get a number of signed tokens from the gov to prove age, then a token could be shared with a site that verifies age without connecting to gov, assuming it's already aware of the gov's public key?
What prevents the same token from being used by more than one person?
How can the site prove compliance with the law? Will they need to store the tokens for each user? Can the gov tie a stored token back to a particular person that that verified?
> I think you're severely underestimating the efficacy of traffic analysis and correlation efforts.
The porn site would have the public key already stored/cached, so there isn't any traffic to correlate. There's still an issue with the first request, but like I said, this is a simple example that's easy to understand without getting into anything math-heavy.
There's ways yes but the bigger issue is that it's much harder to verify. When I show my ID to a cashier I can see whether they photocopy it or not. I can't verify websites and porn ones could be shady.
Not that I personally care that people know I watch porn. But maybe people do care.
Not if you want to be able to pass any kind of audit, no. Not unless the authority issuing the ID participates in a complicated cryptographic protocol. Which none of them do and which is definitely not standardized.
One of the early states passing these, I think it was Louisiana, actually did at least try to step up and deal with the privacy issue. They came up with a trusted-third-party thing. The third parties, who are private entities, have to pinky promise not to leak the data or keep them beyond certain limits. They are not audited. There are no actual penalties if they screw up. That's not acceptable assurance. There are also no limits on what they can charge, come to think of it, and it's not exactly going to be a large fluid market.
None of the other states even went that far. Nor did any of them try to come up with a shared standard.
There's definitely nothing out there that the user can verify as working, or that's certified by anybody the user should trust.
There are also the facts that--
1. All of the "age verification" protocols that the various activists are pushing and the various vendors are hawking are ineffective, in that any halfway motivated kid can easily figure out how to circumvent them, and
2. Kids just seeing porn isn't actually a big problem, especially if they've sought it out.
It makes complete sense to resist this BS.
It seems to me that these bills aren't prescriptive (they say you can use a "commercially reasonable" method). Most states are also moving to adopt the ISO mDL standard[0].
[0] https://www.mdlconnection.com/implementation-tracker-map/
What? First, that has nothing to do with anything. Second, it's not true: most auditing has an in-person component, and many stings don't. Do you actually know what an audit is? Hint: a "pen test" isn't an audit and isn't much like an audit. Neither is a code review.
> Why does auditing always come up with this topic?
1. All security controls need to be audited.
2. There is a 100 percent chance that many of the organizations advocating for these laws, most of which would actually prefer for porn to be outlawed completely, will grab any chance they can to accuse sites of not complying. They'll either try to get sympathetic law enforcement agencies to take up those accusations, or, if they can find a legal avenue, they'll bring lawsuits themselves. They will undoubtedly find anecdotes of system failures, since any large-scale system will fail sometimes. They will claim that as evidence that the rules aren't being followed. Evidence, no matter how flimsy, has to be countered with other evidence, especially if you're in a "preponderance of the evidence" situation. It's pretty hard to show that what you're doing is reasonable or effective if you don't have at least a sample of records.
Like I said, I've seen no laws requiring any audits or record keeping, and actually every law I've seen explicitly makes such records illegal. I don't see why the evidence that sites aren't doing their job wouldn't be the same as in person: the police have someone access the site without valid id, and the site didn't have a commercially reasonable system in place as a defense. If they're not doing their job, it will be easy for police to demonstrate it, and the site will actually be in the wrong.
That's not an "anecdote", just like selling cigarettes to a 16 year old without an id is not an "anecdote". That is breaking the law. It's on companies to follow the law every time.
Given that, your argument seems to be that since we are on the slippery slope, we might as well go further.
For what it's worth, I don't have to show ID to get into an adult bookstore, or enter a bar, or purchase alcohol, because I live in a place which doesn't require ids for people who are obviously old enough.
I've also stopped flying in part because I think airport security is oppressive and a facade, and I don't drive because I managed to find a place where I'm not forced to have a car to live. I hate the pseudoephedrine id law because I think the state should have no business in that matter, and like airport security it's a case of the government seeming to Doing Something even though it does nothing.
Last time I needed pseudoephedrine, I got a friend to buy it for me.
> Are you saying there is absolutely no way to perform this action online in a way that respects privacy just the same as all of those operations?
Correct. I can buy wine without an id because the store clerk can physically verify that I am of age without checking a piece of plastic or otherwise establishing my identity.
Once purchased I could of course give it to a local 16 year old, which would be illegal, but an id check wouldn't change things.
You'll have to have a camera check the user before each porn site visit, or at random checks, and deal with the false positives of a 16-year-old which looks 19 (or false negatives of a 21 year old who looks 17), and strict laws preventing any recording of that information, and somehow assure people that the laws will never change to collect more information - which is hard to believe given the slippery slope shown at airports and elsewhere.
> maybe things that require age verification shouldn't be allowed to operate on the internet.
How do you propose we do that? Block off all IP addresses at the national level for porn site servers hosted in other countries? Block DNS lookups for them? Prevent VPN use? Nix their ability to charge via Visa and MasterCard, or take payments via SWIFT?
These are two very different things.
This law is not only about Pornhub or porn, but about anything each state government consider "harmful". Porn is the excuse for blocking you from accessing, in a not-so-distant future, any topic your local government frames as harmful.
b. pornhub has no monopoly over the internet porn industry. insofar as those men did get so addicted, that would have happened regardless of pornhub existing.
Hmm... something is going on though: https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/sexual-intelligence/...
Which in turn is going to likely lead to even further reductions in birth rate.
I think we need to be careful about all the things that factor into our sub-replacement birthrates.
Sure. But if I look at this objectively, I am not sure it is going to be solved from another angle by liberal societies any time soon. And religious societies, or at least those that are puritanical in this regards will get a significant and likely sustainable demographic advantage as a result. I think this speaks to the larger issues of why religion has persisted and why atheism has yet to be a sustainable endeavour, rather than a demographic sink. Truth doesn't actually matter, viability via demographic sustainability is how things are actually judged.
You are correct that this is the case.
> I don't think that means what you think it means.
I am not sure I follow you logically. You are making a completely separate argument. Many things influence birth rates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_factor_(demography)
And we're not going to go extinct. Plenty of people want kids and have them. Maybe we'll reduce the population a bit which would be great. Less pollution, less pressure on the overloaded housing situation.
Generally when one group shrinks in evolution, it doesn't reduce for long the total pressures on the environment. What usually happens is other groups grow into the new opportunities that have opened up.
Which is only a bad thing if you assume "other groups" are inherently worse. But if the current state is so bad people are openly cheering after a murder, perhaps there are more pressing issues - which likely also contribute to low birth rate.
Can you explain further?
> and destroying their ability to form relationships?
There are many reasons young men today have trouble forming relationships, with pornography among the least concerning in my opinion.