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Comment by dogcatdog | Hacker News Reader

That sounds like a reasonable aim. Online services should be responsible for implementing age verification checks on content that children shouldn't be accessing, just like vendors of alcohol and nicotine products are responsible for age verification.

The EFF likes to frame everything that might even slightly rein in online service providers as being a terrible assault on online freedom and therefore, in their view, shouldn't be done. But I don't see them coming up with any better solutions. Just endless complaints, while soliciting donations to keep generating these endless complaints.

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There's a big difference here, in the US anyways, neither alcohol nor nicotine have first amendment protections. Basically all content delivered over the US does.

That's a much thornier legal issue

But isn't putting something behind an age gate similar in concept to putting it behind a paywall? The speech is still there, whatever it may be, just has conditions for access.

It would probably also be illegal for the government to mandate a paywall.

The issue is not that age gates are illegal, but that the government forcing people to use age gates is illegal.

But there are already laws that, for example, restrict children from buying pornographic magazines. These have been found by the Supreme Court to be constitutionally compatible. I don't see why this would be different with similar laws that apply to online services.

Generally speaking, things that you sell (the legal term is commercial speech, iirc) is more able to be regulated by the government.

The government can ban the sale of those things to minors, generally. So the category of porn sites that require a credit card and pay gate the content might be regulateable.

But that's not how places like pornhub or xvideos operate

"You can own a printing press, but we'll throw you in jail if you dare to show the printings to anyone."

The first amendment is a two way street. Everyone has an inalienable right to seek and read/view any media, and the government of the United States is forbidden from taking any actions that limit the mass dissemination of media.

The whole context of the amendment is existing governments preventing people from mass printing and distributing political pamphlets. "You can write something, but not distribute it" is entirely antithetical to the point of the amendment.

What content shouldn't children be accessing? Is the content a 7, 11 or 16 year old shouldn't access different between age brackets? Who makes that determination? Is this access restriction at the whole site level, or per-post? Does safe-harbor apply, or is a site-operator liable for age-inappropriate content it hosts for its clients? On S3, for example, is each object tagged with an age category, or would it have to be a totally separate S3, like GovCloud?

It requires manual moderation. Companies like Facebook, Google, and co. have spent much effort telling you that's impossible. In fact, that is a type of half-truth that is a lie. The full truth is that it's impossible _at their scale_.

Their business models require little to no human moderation, because it simply doesn't scale (for their business to stay profitable).

Personally, my feeling is that if you can't take care of your product, you should go out of business.

I hate this analogy because it isn't true. This isn't like a clerk checking your age before you buy booze this is like a clerk taking a photocopy of your ID and a list of everything you bought and then storing those records forever every time you buy alcohol.

Most stores already have continuously-recording CCTV, which effectively does that too.

At least online there can be a separation between the age verification provider and the online content provider, so that the latter doesn't learn anything from the former except that the user's age is above or below a specific cut-off point. So it can actually be more privacy-preserving than purchasing age-restricted goods over the counter.

A lot of countries have limits on how long CCTV footage may be stored (often there is a minimum and maximum limit). I believe in the US it is regulated on a per state level.

they literally do that though. They don't all just look at your ID any more, some scan it with a scanner or phone and that literally does what you just said. Paying with a card also does it.

No it's like the publisher of the adult content magazine being liable if an underage person buys the magazine. And due to burden of proof they require all stores that sell their magazine to make a copy of your ID and send it to them along with a recording of you providing the ID at the counter, some stores may require your address, iris or fingerprint scan.

Actually not to them through them to one of the few ID verifier 3rd parties that now receives a big portion of the records of anyone that buys adult content in any store with any publisher.

> vendors of alcohol and nicotine products are responsible for age verification.

You don't wind up in a database for buying alcohol.

This proposal puts your name right next to the category of porn you're into, which will be a great way to coerce all those politicians into voting for the "correct" bill. Would be a shame if they found out a state senator watched porn, so maybe they'd better vote yes on the proposal.

In time, this will be used to shape what people are "allowed" to think. Porn will gradually be purged from the internet and then go away entirely as the US becomes more fundamentalist and Christian.

Then people who are neither of those things will start to be denied jobs and loans. Politicians that don't fit the mold will stop winning.

This is about turning the US to Christianity. (Read: this is really about controlling the massses and using religious fundamentalism as a tool to do so.)

Technology is the perfect tool for control. Just as we were becoming a liberal/libertarian society and letting people live their lives how they wanted, the wrong people started using technology not as an enabler of free minds, but as an inescapable straitjacket.

You've read 1984, right?

The sensors have been widely deployed. The internet will become your Big Brother. You won't be able to buy, sell, or even move between state lines without being in the good graces of the state.

Be a good citizen and comply.

Age verification can be done by a third party, so that the online service isn't provided with any details of your identity, just that you passed an age verification check.

But if you're still worried about online pornographers getting a copy of your identity, maybe don't use their websites? It's an easily avoidable risk. Perhaps use your imagination instead, or read an erotic novel bought in cash from a second-hand bookshop, or something like that.

Do you hear yourself? You're a guy telling people that if they don't want to be put on a list for reading a book, they should read other books.

> erotic novel bought in cash from a second-hand bookshop

Your confidence that this will remain an option probably means that you aren't aware of the many court battles, lives ruined, and leftover frozen conflicts resulting from attempts to publish novels. Its a confidence you could only have developed since the mid-1960s.

There is absolutely no physical reason why the government couldn't record all of the books you buy, arrest secondhand booksellers that don't keep those lists faithfully, and even sit outside of secondhand booksellers identifying everyone walking into the building and putting them on a list of people who are interested in obtaining books through unorthodox methods.

If everyone had been like you, there wouldn't be erotic novels available from bookstores. Or communist novels, or gay novels, etc.. And through the mails, it would become federal. The government mainly opened mail to search for possible birth control information being sent.

That third party? Persona.

> You don't wind up in a database for buying alcohol.

Yes you do, if they scan your ID with any technology they're uploading a picture to that company's server. If you use a payment card then your bank and the card network also know.

They don't scan my id when I buy alcohol.

Do you use a payment card?

> as the US becomes more fundamentalist and Christian.

As Christian I would say "more fundamentalist and less Christian". I am not sure this is religiously based. We have similar things happening in European countries that are not religious. Its a moral panic and "think of the children".

> You don't wind up in a database for buying alcohol.

My (just turned 18) daughter said a pub in the UK scanned her driving license so they may well be connecting to some database before letting young people buy alcohol. IIRC the EU wants its age verification app to be used for things like this.

This is a time of "first they came for the....".

I agree with you. It's less about the religion and more about the control.

Christianity is easy to reach for in the US, especially when there are sects and denominations that align with government-mandated censorship of certain ideologies.

> You don't wind up in a database for buying alcohol.

I don't think this is a good assumption. It's not uncommon for stores to scan your ID when you buy alcohol.

> This proposal puts your name right next to the category of porn you're into, which will be a great way to coerce all those politicians into voting for the "correct" bill. Would be a shame if they found out a state senator watched porn, so maybe they'd better vote yes on the proposal.

This is not quite how typical systems are structured. Rather, the service provider outsources the age assurance to some third party Age Verification Provider (AVP), which then just returns an age estimate or a yes/no. Commonly, the AVP will have a stated policy that they don't share your identity with the client.

Obviously, you have to trust the AVP to comply with this policy, which is not ideal. There are approaches (e.g., zero-knowledge proofs) that provide some technical privacy protections, but they're not currently in wide use.

Note: this is not an endorsement of age assurance; I'm just trying to clarify the situation.

Nah, it should be like in California. When you set up an account you should put how old thr user is, and websites should get a header that says whether it's over 18 or not. No ID checks, just good parenting.

Aims aside, did you even read the article? This will mostly end anonymity online and require heavier policing of content.

A child might see something they shouldn't walking down the street, strolling thru the park, visiting the local zoo, or visiting an ice cream parlor. Should those places be requiring identification and hiring extra security guards to wander around making sure nobody is saying it doing anything politically objectionable?

Let's not accept creeping digital tyranny with self-assuring complacency... call or write (preferably snail mail) your congresspeople!!

Why can't we talk about the topic that is in front of us instead of making absurd comparisons like hiring security guards to check ID to enter parks?

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