7 ms·

Seven states push to require ID for watching porn online

51 points by stoicanalyst 4y ago

agentwiggles 4y ago
Obviously, this is problematic as it would be implemented currently, since age verification is necessarily tied to state identification, meaning that you're forced to give up your privacy to verify your age. If there was a good way to verify age without needing my full identity, I'd probably be in favor of something like this. God knows I'd prefer my kids don't have access to porn (although I'm not 100% sure I think they shouldn't be able to access it at all until they're 18, they're currently young enough that a total ban is correct). A few years back, some blockchain enthusiast was extolling to me the virtues of a blockchain backed identity system where you could provide some kind of verified attestation based on a credential - for example, I could use it to prove I'm 18 to the porn site without also giving forth all the other information on my ID. One of the more interesting ideas I've heard for blockchain. I don't know enough about the topic to know if a chain is _necessary_ for that use case, but I like the idea of being able to verify information in a minimally invasive way.
- 7e 4y ago
  Blind signatures to the rescue?
- arcticbull 4y ago
  You can do that without the blockchain using something like Estonia's 20 year old digital signature scheme. All you need is a private key, not distributed consensus 'not your keys not your porn' silliness. [1] A blockchain doesn't help here because your personal identity is not a bearer token. If someone has your private keys they do not become you. And if they do have your private keys you better have some authority to revoke them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signature_in_Estonia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signature_in_Estonia
  - agentwiggles 4y ago
    That's really cool, I don't know how I'd never heard about this before. And yes, just in case it wasn't clear, I'm not advocating blockchain here, I have no stake in that stuff or any real understanding of it. But I do like the "digital signatures/attestations" idea. Thanks for sharing the wiki link, I'll have to do some more reading on Estonia's system.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  I personally believe this should be controlled at a device level, not at a state or national level. But on a theoretical basis, yes, you could use so-called "soul bound tokens" attached to an Ethereum address, for example, for this use case. A soul bound token is similar to an NFT, but cannot be traded. It is bound to a particular address. So in theory, you could go through some service provider for the identity verification, give them an Ethereum address to attach the 18+ SBT to, and then you could simply sign a message from that address for any website that required 18+ verification (would cost no gas, it's just a signature). See Vitalik's blog post on SBTs for more info: https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/01/26/soulbound.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/01/26/soulbound.html
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mildmotive 4y ago
  > although I'm not 100% sure I think they shouldn't be able to access it at all until they're 18 Obviously I can’t tell you how to raise your own children, but you yourself are seeing that porn is harmful at least up to a certain age. It’s especially good to prevent porn during a child’s formative years. I would argue that porn isn’t good for anyone really, considering at least the following factors: 1. Like a drug, it numbs the senses and leads to the consumer needing more and more extreme content to feel the same level of satisfaction as before. 2. It’s not clear whether or not the female participants are consenting or not. Not too long ago PornHub got a lot of heat for spreading videos of the abuse of minors on their platform. They ended up having to purge millions of their videos because consent could not be verified. So imagine if God forbid you or your child unknowingly watches these types of abuse. 3. It changes the viewer’s attitude to women. Porn portrays women as public toilets, no dignity or honour whatsoever. 4. If you’re fine with other people’s daughters acting in these videos, then ask yourself: would you accept that for your own womenfolk? There is more to say, but let’s move on. You can technically bypass this using a VPN. What this law practically does is adding an additional hurdle for children from seeing this stuff, and that’s something good. Adults on the other hand, are generally speaking capable of setting up a VPN to bypass whatever filter they want.
  - agentwiggles 4y ago
    Yeah, no real argument from me on most of that. I'm mostly hesitant due to my own understanding of my own desire to see naked women when I was a teenager and, to be crude about it, a pretty constant desire to jerk off. Obviously ideally my kids will stick to their imaginations and consenting partners, that's what I would wish for for them if I could. But I'm not sure it's a totally realistic expectation, and one of the weird things about being a parent but also a person who was once young is that I want my kids to have the opportunities to come to their own conclusions about what's good and bad for them. As another example, I don't want my kids to drink or smoke pot before they are of legal age to do so. And ideally, maybe never? But at the same time, occasionally doing that stuff when I was a young man was fun, and formed good memories and social bonds. While it's my role as a parent to set rules that they can't do those things, to issue consequences if I catch them smoking weed or drinking it whatever, I also understand the desire and think tm there's a certain... benefit, I guess, to their attempts to circumvent my rules? I realize I'm pretty much contradicting myself repeatedly here, and also failing to take a hard beneficial moral stance... but that seems to be part and parcel to the experience of being a parent but simultaneously remembering being a kid.
lom 4y ago
This will only push underage users to more underground sites, that don’t care enough about the laws, and which have even more extreme content. Whoever thinks that teenagers will stop watching porn because of this is incredibly naive.
- bradlys 4y ago
  This will also push me (an adult) to other websites. I have no interest in giving any ID to any random website.
  - flangola7 4y ago
    There will probably be a secure 3rd party identity provider that all the sites use eventually. The video sites will only receive a binary yes or no indicating if the user is "authorized." All of this is beyond sanity though. Porn is not evil. My dad grew up with Hustler, I grew up with The Pirate Bay, and my kids are growing up with 4K Pornhub (after they reached age 12 we disabled the content filters on the home DNS server, also using it as an opportunity to teach how DNS and basic networking functions). Government (and let's be honest, on this topic it's almost entirely one party in particular) needs to mind its own business. Sex, and things related to sex, are a personal matter. Thinking that I have the right to dictate someone else's personal life in this manner is not something that ever cross my mind, much less thinking it consciousable, much less introducing and voting for it to be the law of the land.
    - alienicecream 4y ago
      What if porn is evil, but you don't see why anymore because it changes you?
      - flangola7 4y ago
        Porn doesn't change you, so that concern can be safely discarded. It's not evil because there's no harm being inflicted. Adults who consent to have sex and doing it on camera are not engaging in evil. A person consenting to watch the video is not engaging in evil. There are tangential harms such as abuse and exploitation of the actors, but that's not inherent to porn (there is ethically produced porn) nor unique to it (actors in Hollywood are also exploited). The answer to those problems are breaking down existing power structures and zealously protecting worker rights, not banning Pornhub and AMC Theaters.
superkuh 4y ago
Normally bills like these would not get any traction. But lately western society as has fully embraced the delusion that multimedia when viewed on screens have the magical ability to bypass normal sensory perception and cause addiction like drugs do. The shift in the overton window from the "screen time" hysteria has enabled these bills to be presented and not immediately laughed out of congress like they're still laughed out of scientific journals.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  I wouldn't blame screen time hysteria when films, TV, comic books and music have all had their turn with moral panics.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  Do not mistake christo-fascist right-wing extremists for "western society." These sorts of bills are nowhere near mainstream positions. Even if they don't get the bill, they can still get something of an anchoring effect and shift the overton window. At the very least, they get to shout on their podcasts and religious radio talk shows about how they're fighting the good fight against us heathens.
  - myko 4y ago
    > These sorts of bills are nowhere near mainstream positions. I don't think being mainstream matters much, most Americans support abortion rights, for example.
- alienicecream 4y ago
  Why do you assume it's about addiction? Maybe porn is evil in itself and you don't need a second order evil. Also, the entire advertising and marketing industry is based on creating desire from a distance, you've just saved them billions by declaring their efforts futile.
earthboundkid 4y ago
Didn’t the UK try this recently? What happened with that? Was it struck down? Ineffective?
- denkmoon 4y ago
  "After a series of setbacks, the planned scheme was eventually abandoned in 2019,[4] and would be formally repealed by the planned Online Safety Bill.[5]"
  - earthboundkid 4y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_UK_Internet_age_verification_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_UK_Internet_age_ver...
- dudul 4y ago
  I think Germany had something like this too. I believe Steam users in Germany can't buy some games with nudity because of that.
ryan_lane 4y ago
The same folks that fought tooth and nail against the clipper chip are the ones now pushing for ID to watch porn. The clipper chip was a self-censoring device, which gave parents control over their children. It was one of the various things that got democrats labeled as the "nanny state". There's a good reason to oppose the clipper chip, and it wasn't because the chip was the problem, it's because the chip used content ratings, and its use would have required further labeling of content. This ID law is a form of state-sponsored censorship and tracking. The true purpose here is to later push this to requiring IDs for other things on the internet, and to setup the infrastructure necessary to do so. It's nanny-state, but as usual, the "protect the children" thing here isn't the purpose, just the vehicle. They don't want to protect your morals or your children, they want the ability to control your access to information.
- KZerda 4y ago
  I think you're confusing the Clipper Chip [1], which was a poorly implemented crypto system, with the V-chip [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-chip
  - ryan_lane 4y ago
    Ah, yes, I am. Thank you!
Connor_Creegan 4y ago
As someone who is certainly on-board with the greater fight against the Devil's iconography, I can't foresee this kind of legislation as having an overall good impact, especially with how popular commercial VPNs have become and how frequently you see them advertised. Children aren't stupid. And as other commenters here have pointed out, kids that aren't smart enough to use VPNs will probably just look for non-compliant sites or other means of access. States simply aren't equipped to deal with the issue of access. And not only that, but the issue of access is a false framing of the problem, when there should be as much (if not more) concern about the very existence of pornography, the means by which it is made (prostitution, voyeurism, and exploitation), and the motivations for making it (injured intellect and corrupt will). Until people are having the more important conversation about sexual ethics, the very meaning of our sex, and not this phony "sex education" you get in public schools, I don't think we will see meaningful improvement.

51 points by stoicanalyst 4y ago

Obviously, this is problematic as it would be implemented currently, since age verification is necessarily tied to state identification, meaning that you're forced to give up your privacy to verify your age. If there was a good way to verify age without needing my full identity, I'd probably be in favor of something like this. God knows I'd prefer my kids don't have access to porn (although I'm not 100% sure I think they shouldn't be able to access it at all until they're 18, they're currently young enough that a total ban is correct). A few years back, some blockchain enthusiast was extolling to me the virtues of a blockchain backed identity system where you could provide some kind of verified attestation based on a credential - for example, I could use it to prove I'm 18 to the porn site without also giving forth all the other information on my ID. One of the more interesting ideas I've heard for blockchain. I don't know enough about the topic to know if a chain is _necessary_ for that use case, but I like the idea of being able to verify information in a minimally invasive way.

7e 4y ago
Blind signatures to the rescue?
arcticbull 4y ago
You can do that without the blockchain using something like Estonia's 20 year old digital signature scheme. All you need is a private key, not distributed consensus 'not your keys not your porn' silliness. [1] A blockchain doesn't help here because your personal identity is not a bearer token. If someone has your private keys they do not become you. And if they do have your private keys you better have some authority to revoke them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signature_in_Estonia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signature_in_Estonia
- agentwiggles 4y ago
  That's really cool, I don't know how I'd never heard about this before. And yes, just in case it wasn't clear, I'm not advocating blockchain here, I have no stake in that stuff or any real understanding of it. But I do like the "digital signatures/attestations" idea. Thanks for sharing the wiki link, I'll have to do some more reading on Estonia's system.
chrisco255 4y ago
I personally believe this should be controlled at a device level, not at a state or national level. But on a theoretical basis, yes, you could use so-called "soul bound tokens" attached to an Ethereum address, for example, for this use case. A soul bound token is similar to an NFT, but cannot be traded. It is bound to a particular address. So in theory, you could go through some service provider for the identity verification, give them an Ethereum address to attach the 18+ SBT to, and then you could simply sign a message from that address for any website that required 18+ verification (would cost no gas, it's just a signature). See Vitalik's blog post on SBTs for more info: https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/01/26/soulbound.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/01/26/soulbound.html
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mildmotive 4y ago
> although I'm not 100% sure I think they shouldn't be able to access it at all until they're 18 Obviously I can’t tell you how to raise your own children, but you yourself are seeing that porn is harmful at least up to a certain age. It’s especially good to prevent porn during a child’s formative years. I would argue that porn isn’t good for anyone really, considering at least the following factors: 1. Like a drug, it numbs the senses and leads to the consumer needing more and more extreme content to feel the same level of satisfaction as before. 2. It’s not clear whether or not the female participants are consenting or not. Not too long ago PornHub got a lot of heat for spreading videos of the abuse of minors on their platform. They ended up having to purge millions of their videos because consent could not be verified. So imagine if God forbid you or your child unknowingly watches these types of abuse. 3. It changes the viewer’s attitude to women. Porn portrays women as public toilets, no dignity or honour whatsoever. 4. If you’re fine with other people’s daughters acting in these videos, then ask yourself: would you accept that for your own womenfolk? There is more to say, but let’s move on. You can technically bypass this using a VPN. What this law practically does is adding an additional hurdle for children from seeing this stuff, and that’s something good. Adults on the other hand, are generally speaking capable of setting up a VPN to bypass whatever filter they want.
- agentwiggles 4y ago
  Yeah, no real argument from me on most of that. I'm mostly hesitant due to my own understanding of my own desire to see naked women when I was a teenager and, to be crude about it, a pretty constant desire to jerk off. Obviously ideally my kids will stick to their imaginations and consenting partners, that's what I would wish for for them if I could. But I'm not sure it's a totally realistic expectation, and one of the weird things about being a parent but also a person who was once young is that I want my kids to have the opportunities to come to their own conclusions about what's good and bad for them. As another example, I don't want my kids to drink or smoke pot before they are of legal age to do so. And ideally, maybe never? But at the same time, occasionally doing that stuff when I was a young man was fun, and formed good memories and social bonds. While it's my role as a parent to set rules that they can't do those things, to issue consequences if I catch them smoking weed or drinking it whatever, I also understand the desire and think tm there's a certain... benefit, I guess, to their attempts to circumvent my rules? I realize I'm pretty much contradicting myself repeatedly here, and also failing to take a hard beneficial moral stance... but that seems to be part and parcel to the experience of being a parent but simultaneously remembering being a kid.

lom 4y ago

This will only push underage users to more underground sites, that don’t care enough about the laws, and which have even more extreme content. Whoever thinks that teenagers will stop watching porn because of this is incredibly naive.

bradlys 4y ago
This will also push me (an adult) to other websites. I have no interest in giving any ID to any random website.
- flangola7 4y ago
  There will probably be a secure 3rd party identity provider that all the sites use eventually. The video sites will only receive a binary yes or no indicating if the user is "authorized." All of this is beyond sanity though. Porn is not evil. My dad grew up with Hustler, I grew up with The Pirate Bay, and my kids are growing up with 4K Pornhub (after they reached age 12 we disabled the content filters on the home DNS server, also using it as an opportunity to teach how DNS and basic networking functions). Government (and let's be honest, on this topic it's almost entirely one party in particular) needs to mind its own business. Sex, and things related to sex, are a personal matter. Thinking that I have the right to dictate someone else's personal life in this manner is not something that ever cross my mind, much less thinking it consciousable, much less introducing and voting for it to be the law of the land.
  - alienicecream 4y ago
    What if porn is evil, but you don't see why anymore because it changes you?
    - flangola7 4y ago
      Porn doesn't change you, so that concern can be safely discarded. It's not evil because there's no harm being inflicted. Adults who consent to have sex and doing it on camera are not engaging in evil. A person consenting to watch the video is not engaging in evil. There are tangential harms such as abuse and exploitation of the actors, but that's not inherent to porn (there is ethically produced porn) nor unique to it (actors in Hollywood are also exploited). The answer to those problems are breaking down existing power structures and zealously protecting worker rights, not banning Pornhub and AMC Theaters.

superkuh 4y ago

Normally bills like these would not get any traction. But lately western society as has fully embraced the delusion that multimedia when viewed on screens have the magical ability to bypass normal sensory perception and cause addiction like drugs do. The shift in the overton window from the "screen time" hysteria has enabled these bills to be presented and not immediately laughed out of congress like they're still laughed out of scientific journals.

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
I wouldn't blame screen time hysteria when films, TV, comic books and music have all had their turn with moral panics.
KennyBlanken 4y ago
Do not mistake christo-fascist right-wing extremists for "western society." These sorts of bills are nowhere near mainstream positions. Even if they don't get the bill, they can still get something of an anchoring effect and shift the overton window. At the very least, they get to shout on their podcasts and religious radio talk shows about how they're fighting the good fight against us heathens.
- myko 4y ago
  > These sorts of bills are nowhere near mainstream positions. I don't think being mainstream matters much, most Americans support abortion rights, for example.
alienicecream 4y ago
Why do you assume it's about addiction? Maybe porn is evil in itself and you don't need a second order evil. Also, the entire advertising and marketing industry is based on creating desire from a distance, you've just saved them billions by declaring their efforts futile.

earthboundkid 4y ago

Didn’t the UK try this recently? What happened with that? Was it struck down? Ineffective?

denkmoon 4y ago
"After a series of setbacks, the planned scheme was eventually abandoned in 2019,[4] and would be formally repealed by the planned Online Safety Bill.[5]"
- earthboundkid 4y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_UK_Internet_age_verification_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_UK_Internet_age_ver...
dudul 4y ago
I think Germany had something like this too. I believe Steam users in Germany can't buy some games with nudity because of that.

ryan_lane 4y ago

The same folks that fought tooth and nail against the clipper chip are the ones now pushing for ID to watch porn. The clipper chip was a self-censoring device, which gave parents control over their children. It was one of the various things that got democrats labeled as the "nanny state". There's a good reason to oppose the clipper chip, and it wasn't because the chip was the problem, it's because the chip used content ratings, and its use would have required further labeling of content. This ID law is a form of state-sponsored censorship and tracking. The true purpose here is to later push this to requiring IDs for other things on the internet, and to setup the infrastructure necessary to do so. It's nanny-state, but as usual, the "protect the children" thing here isn't the purpose, just the vehicle. They don't want to protect your morals or your children, they want the ability to control your access to information.

KZerda 4y ago
I think you're confusing the Clipper Chip [1], which was a poorly implemented crypto system, with the V-chip [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-chip
- ryan_lane 4y ago
  Ah, yes, I am. Thank you!

Connor_Creegan 4y ago

As someone who is certainly on-board with the greater fight against the Devil's iconography, I can't foresee this kind of legislation as having an overall good impact, especially with how popular commercial VPNs have become and how frequently you see them advertised. Children aren't stupid. And as other commenters here have pointed out, kids that aren't smart enough to use VPNs will probably just look for non-compliant sites or other means of access. States simply aren't equipped to deal with the issue of access. And not only that, but the issue of access is a false framing of the problem, when there should be as much (if not more) concern about the very existence of pornography, the means by which it is made (prostitution, voyeurism, and exploitation), and the motivations for making it (injured intellect and corrupt will). Until people are having the more important conversation about sexual ethics, the very meaning of our sex, and not this phony "sex education" you get in public schools, I don't think we will see meaningful improvement.