5 ms·

I hope that law makers, PH and perhaps the EFF help people see that a government database is not the appropriate means to deal with under-age access to adult or

I hope that law makers, PH and perhaps the EFF help people see that a government database is not the appropriate means to deal with under-age access to adult or user-generated content. As mentioned previously [1][2] the right way to do this is to legislate that these sites add the RTA header to any domain/url that may have adult or user-generated content and then recognize this header in the most common web clients so that parental controls can be utilized and each parent or device owner may decide what is appropriate without putting an ID into every site. A header is trivial to add, trivial to verify is active and the legal liability is then shifted to the parent as it is for everything else related to their child. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34726509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34726509 [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35762808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35762808

3np 3y ago
I wasn't aware of RTA previously: https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howto https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howto https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/140741 https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/140741
- LinuxBender 3y ago
  RTA and PICS used to be recognized by all the major browsers but no laws came of it so developers stopped maintaining the feature. I'm certain it would be trivial to add back to all the popular browsers and even easier to add to site-specific single purpose apps.
rcme 3y ago
Parental controls are trivial to bypass. I don’t support a government database either, but suggesting digital parental controls is not a valid solution.
- LinuxBender 3y ago
  parental controls is not a valid solution I disagree. It does not have to be perfect, certainly not in the first pass given that right now there is no working solution at all. It just has to cover most of the popular web clients on phones and tablets to cover the small children. With time devices and web agents can iterate through improvements. In terms of bypassing, teens will bypass it but they can just visit sites that a database would never be enforced on in the first place. Many teens today know a myriad of ways to bypass restrictions for porn, drugs, pirating movies and games but that is a different issue all together. Trying to fix this for teens will just splinter the internet even more and will not accomplish anything. By requiring any site that has adult or user-generated site to add a header any client or government can verify that header is in place. If not they can be reported and the company fined after the implementation phase / period is over. The current solution does not even exist. Creating centralized databases will clearly just lead to endless lawsuits and just divides of the internet per state which is nearly impossible to enforce. That only benefits feeding the starving lawyers and VPN providers.
  - rcme 3y ago
    You’re just severely underestimating kids. If it’s enforced at the client level, kids will download a more permissive client. It’s so easy to bypass. Kids are highly motivated, highly intelligent, and have a ton of time.
    - LinuxBender 3y ago
      You’re just severely underestimating kids. I am not underestimating anyone. If a kid is curious enough and smart enough they can bypass anything just as their older teen peers. I would suggest if a kid is smart enough to know what they want to watch then they can probably handle the content or just go to one of the many sites not using the centralized databases as their older teen peers would. That of course should be a discussion between them and their parents. Maybe Usenet will make a come-back by the demand of clever children. If a kid is not ready for said content and they still bypass it then it should be on their parent to educate them and/or discipline them as with anything else between a parent and child. If it is leading to problems then social services will sort it out as they would with any other parental issue. People must not accept going down this dystopian route of building a centralized ID and even more censorious technology that could easily be extended to any content, not just adult. [Edit] I should also point out that most tablet and phone OS's support having child accounts. Child accounts can not install any applications.
- TheCoelacanth 3y ago
  This block is also trivial to bypass. You can't shoot down proposed solutions on the basis that they aren't perfect unless you actually have a perfect alternative.
  - KnobbleMcKnees 3y ago
    I'd argue the block is more trivial to bypass as parental controls can frequently be secured in some way. Until these blocks cannot be overcome by typing "free VPN" in to Google, they will remain toothless.
  - throwaway98721 3y ago
    Perhaps there is no perfect alternative. Perhaps the cost of a perfect alternative is too high. And perhaps, perfect is the enemy of good.
- DropInIn 3y ago
  Kids aren't allowed to drive. Parents have the keys and vehicles in easy access to the children but by and large it's not a problem. Interesting that despite actual deaths occuring as a result of this norm (when kids do take the cars and crash), we haven't added a law that that only opens the car on a fingerprint scan or some shit, which is effectively what this is equivalent to. If DEATH doesn't justify such draconian measures then porn most definitely doesn't
  - rcme 3y ago
    > Parents have the keys and vehicles in easy access to the children but by and large it's not a problem. It looks like you refute your own argument here. We don't highly regulate automobile access because it's not an issue. Most kids don't have a desire to steal their parents cars, so why would we regulate that? Many kids do have the desire to access things that may harm their development. So you can see why your analogy is largely nonsensical.
    - DropInIn 3y ago
      Kia boys? Seriously... You dont know what you're talking about. The vast majority of auto thefts are children taking the family car unauthorized, including well below the age of a learners permit.
      - rcme 3y ago
        Even if what you say is true regarding familial auto theft, which I highly doubt, the percentage of auto thefts committed by children is irrelevant. The more relevant question is “what percentage of children are involved in auto theft” not “what percentage of auto thefts involve children.” The answer to “what percentage of children are involved in auto thefts” is a minuscule amount. Conversely, “what percentage of children access harmful content” is likely quite high. Do you see the difference?
        DropInIn 3y ago
        They go unreported and dealt with in the family, with the vehicle not being destroyed. Then the therea the class of theft referenced with Kia Boys... Literally teenagers and preteens stealing cars with USB cables.... Go look at reality first before you try to tell me what it is.
_8j50 3y ago
Getting browsers to implement it as a matter of legal requirement is another huge issue. My proposal is for the government itself to do blind age verification on their own site and issue an expiring token scoped to the user's IP. The porn site would load JS from the gov site or from its own servers that pops up age verification prompt loaded from the government site, gets the signed token to be verified by the porn site. What the government does to verify age is up to them but my approach would be to verify that they have a valid payment card or a mobile phone number (verified by sms code) where the screenshot of their ID matches whoever is an adult part of the phone subscription plan. Ideally, verification is done once and all you do is login. I said blind verification because you can have it so that the gov site doesn't know from what site the verification is requested. This can also be applied for social media and other restrictions. You all can disagree ideologically but this happening. I think it's best to discuss how to do this in a way that respects the privacy of users without allowing middle parties to abuse it.
- brightlancer 3y ago
  Government mandates are never going to get some sites to comply, so why is government threatening the companies who _want_ to comply? If we removed the legal mandate, we could do this with voluntary industry support. MindGeek owns not just PornHub but tons of other sites -- if they said "We'll publish this header; dear Mozilla and Google, please support/ build parental controls that check for this header," then most other mainstream porn sites would join in too. People shouldn't have to tell the government they're going to read a (dirty) book, and they shouldn't have to identify themselves to porn businesses.
  - _8j50 3y ago
    > People shouldn't have to tell the government they're going to read a (dirty) book Libraries and book stores can and do ask IDs for adult books (less so these days). Same thing. They should identify themselves to the gov, porn sites should only get prood of a succesful identification without identifying users. The gov can id you but it shouldn't know what sigtes you visit. That way your privacy is protected. > Government mandates are never going to get some sites to comply They can force US sites and fine/prosecute. The rest, they can order ISPs to block them for non-compliance. > If we removed the legal mandate, we could do this with voluntary industry support The industry has had decades of pleading from child safety advocates. It's like saying tobacco companies should be trusted with tobacco warnings and working with store owners on making sure minors are ID'd before a sale. Many in the porn industry strongly feel any teenager should be able to watch porn and many more believe people can get porn anyways so there is no point. They have faced lawsuits and investigations and many countries have been banning them for a long time over this concern so your reasoning that suddenly they will voluntarily work with browsers makes little sense to me. Perhaps the gov can have some working group under FTC to come up with a tech thar enforces the law and porn sites can work with it and i see no problem including browser makers but at the end of the day just like any id verification system, someone has to be responsible for the verification. Where my idea deviates is that I believe the gov should be responsible for enforcing it's own laws and public key crypto can effectively split the responsibility of verifying age and making sure only verified users have access.
paulddraper 3y ago
Wow this is really interesting suggestion. I'm firmly in the "porn and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race" camp. We require actual age verification for tobacco and alcohol. I don't see a reason not to require the same for porn. That said, I am interested in the most effective ways to keep tobacco, alcohol, and porn out of the hands of minors.
- johngladtj 3y ago
  We should not require it for those things either.
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    Really? Twelve year old wants to buy a six pack and you say okay here you go kid.
- moonchild 3y ago
  I agree that widely available pornography has probably been a net negative for society. However: 1. I'm not convinced that it is markedly worse than other harmful content which is now widely available on the internet. 2. I don't think efficacy should be the primary consideration. For instance, mass censorship is rather effective, but clearly unconscionable. I'm not sure if you can make a cure which isn't worse than the disease.
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    I imagine you can, given how bad the disease is.
- DropInIn 3y ago
  Unless you legislate age restriction on the Bible you can't reasonably argue for porn restriction... Images of consenting adults is a far cry less offensive and damaging than parables and stories explicitly stating girls should be fed to rape crazed mobs in order to protect "special guests", amoung many other horrors....
brightlancer 3y ago
> the right way to do this is to legislate that these sites add the RTA header to any domain/url that may have adult or user-generated content ... > A header is trivial to add, trivial to verify is active and the legal liability is then shifted to the parent as it is for everything else related to their child. No, you just said the web site is responsible for publishing the header, which means they have legal liability. Does HackerNews have "user-generated content"? Does it have to publish the same header as Pornhub? And as you later write: "In terms of bypassing, teens will bypass it but they can just visit sites that a database would never be enforced on in the first place." Exactly. That's also from the article: "In its Twitter statement, Pornhub alleged that a major problem with these laws is that states "are not regulating enforcement." This means that major platforms like Pornhub will likely comply with the laws voluntarily—or else risk fines of up to $1 million annually, the FSC estimated—while users seeking to avoid age verification will simply migrate over to seedier platforms that don't require ID and often pose security and privacy risks to users." IOW, it wouldn't work and would just be a way to go after mainstream websites that ran afoul of a politician.
- sheepscreek 3y ago
  > No, you just said the web site is responsible for publishing the header, which means they have legal liability. I can see the difference. Website has the liability for not adding the header. Parents have the liability for not “enforcing” checks on devices a child might use. It’s a clever proposal but more details will need to be thought through.
  - manvillej 3y ago
    It incentivizes cooperation rather than punishing it. Seedier sites will be more liable while the implementation is negligible for sites that want to cooperate. The other solutions puts technological hurdles, additional points of failure, and liability on cooperating sites that will push away legal adult traffic from them to seedier sites.

3np 3y ago

I wasn't aware of RTA previously: https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howto https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howto https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/140741 https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/140741

LinuxBender 3y ago
RTA and PICS used to be recognized by all the major browsers but no laws came of it so developers stopped maintaining the feature. I'm certain it would be trivial to add back to all the popular browsers and even easier to add to site-specific single purpose apps.

rcme 3y ago

Parental controls are trivial to bypass. I don’t support a government database either, but suggesting digital parental controls is not a valid solution.

LinuxBender 3y ago
parental controls is not a valid solution I disagree. It does not have to be perfect, certainly not in the first pass given that right now there is no working solution at all. It just has to cover most of the popular web clients on phones and tablets to cover the small children. With time devices and web agents can iterate through improvements. In terms of bypassing, teens will bypass it but they can just visit sites that a database would never be enforced on in the first place. Many teens today know a myriad of ways to bypass restrictions for porn, drugs, pirating movies and games but that is a different issue all together. Trying to fix this for teens will just splinter the internet even more and will not accomplish anything. By requiring any site that has adult or user-generated site to add a header any client or government can verify that header is in place. If not they can be reported and the company fined after the implementation phase / period is over. The current solution does not even exist. Creating centralized databases will clearly just lead to endless lawsuits and just divides of the internet per state which is nearly impossible to enforce. That only benefits feeding the starving lawyers and VPN providers.
- rcme 3y ago
  You’re just severely underestimating kids. If it’s enforced at the client level, kids will download a more permissive client. It’s so easy to bypass. Kids are highly motivated, highly intelligent, and have a ton of time.
  - LinuxBender 3y ago
    You’re just severely underestimating kids. I am not underestimating anyone. If a kid is curious enough and smart enough they can bypass anything just as their older teen peers. I would suggest if a kid is smart enough to know what they want to watch then they can probably handle the content or just go to one of the many sites not using the centralized databases as their older teen peers would. That of course should be a discussion between them and their parents. Maybe Usenet will make a come-back by the demand of clever children. If a kid is not ready for said content and they still bypass it then it should be on their parent to educate them and/or discipline them as with anything else between a parent and child. If it is leading to problems then social services will sort it out as they would with any other parental issue. People must not accept going down this dystopian route of building a centralized ID and even more censorious technology that could easily be extended to any content, not just adult. [Edit] I should also point out that most tablet and phone OS's support having child accounts. Child accounts can not install any applications.
TheCoelacanth 3y ago
This block is also trivial to bypass. You can't shoot down proposed solutions on the basis that they aren't perfect unless you actually have a perfect alternative.
- KnobbleMcKnees 3y ago
  I'd argue the block is more trivial to bypass as parental controls can frequently be secured in some way. Until these blocks cannot be overcome by typing "free VPN" in to Google, they will remain toothless.
- throwaway98721 3y ago
  Perhaps there is no perfect alternative. Perhaps the cost of a perfect alternative is too high. And perhaps, perfect is the enemy of good.
DropInIn 3y ago
Kids aren't allowed to drive. Parents have the keys and vehicles in easy access to the children but by and large it's not a problem. Interesting that despite actual deaths occuring as a result of this norm (when kids do take the cars and crash), we haven't added a law that that only opens the car on a fingerprint scan or some shit, which is effectively what this is equivalent to. If DEATH doesn't justify such draconian measures then porn most definitely doesn't
- rcme 3y ago
  > Parents have the keys and vehicles in easy access to the children but by and large it's not a problem. It looks like you refute your own argument here. We don't highly regulate automobile access because it's not an issue. Most kids don't have a desire to steal their parents cars, so why would we regulate that? Many kids do have the desire to access things that may harm their development. So you can see why your analogy is largely nonsensical.
  - DropInIn 3y ago
    Kia boys? Seriously... You dont know what you're talking about. The vast majority of auto thefts are children taking the family car unauthorized, including well below the age of a learners permit.
    - rcme 3y ago
      Even if what you say is true regarding familial auto theft, which I highly doubt, the percentage of auto thefts committed by children is irrelevant. The more relevant question is “what percentage of children are involved in auto theft” not “what percentage of auto thefts involve children.” The answer to “what percentage of children are involved in auto thefts” is a minuscule amount. Conversely, “what percentage of children access harmful content” is likely quite high. Do you see the difference?
      - DropInIn 3y ago
        They go unreported and dealt with in the family, with the vehicle not being destroyed. Then the therea the class of theft referenced with Kia Boys... Literally teenagers and preteens stealing cars with USB cables.... Go look at reality first before you try to tell me what it is.

_8j50 3y ago

Getting browsers to implement it as a matter of legal requirement is another huge issue. My proposal is for the government itself to do blind age verification on their own site and issue an expiring token scoped to the user's IP. The porn site would load JS from the gov site or from its own servers that pops up age verification prompt loaded from the government site, gets the signed token to be verified by the porn site. What the government does to verify age is up to them but my approach would be to verify that they have a valid payment card or a mobile phone number (verified by sms code) where the screenshot of their ID matches whoever is an adult part of the phone subscription plan. Ideally, verification is done once and all you do is login. I said blind verification because you can have it so that the gov site doesn't know from what site the verification is requested. This can also be applied for social media and other restrictions. You all can disagree ideologically but this happening. I think it's best to discuss how to do this in a way that respects the privacy of users without allowing middle parties to abuse it.

brightlancer 3y ago
Government mandates are never going to get some sites to comply, so why is government threatening the companies who _want_ to comply? If we removed the legal mandate, we could do this with voluntary industry support. MindGeek owns not just PornHub but tons of other sites -- if they said "We'll publish this header; dear Mozilla and Google, please support/ build parental controls that check for this header," then most other mainstream porn sites would join in too. People shouldn't have to tell the government they're going to read a (dirty) book, and they shouldn't have to identify themselves to porn businesses.
- _8j50 3y ago
  > People shouldn't have to tell the government they're going to read a (dirty) book Libraries and book stores can and do ask IDs for adult books (less so these days). Same thing. They should identify themselves to the gov, porn sites should only get prood of a succesful identification without identifying users. The gov can id you but it shouldn't know what sigtes you visit. That way your privacy is protected. > Government mandates are never going to get some sites to comply They can force US sites and fine/prosecute. The rest, they can order ISPs to block them for non-compliance. > If we removed the legal mandate, we could do this with voluntary industry support The industry has had decades of pleading from child safety advocates. It's like saying tobacco companies should be trusted with tobacco warnings and working with store owners on making sure minors are ID'd before a sale. Many in the porn industry strongly feel any teenager should be able to watch porn and many more believe people can get porn anyways so there is no point. They have faced lawsuits and investigations and many countries have been banning them for a long time over this concern so your reasoning that suddenly they will voluntarily work with browsers makes little sense to me. Perhaps the gov can have some working group under FTC to come up with a tech thar enforces the law and porn sites can work with it and i see no problem including browser makers but at the end of the day just like any id verification system, someone has to be responsible for the verification. Where my idea deviates is that I believe the gov should be responsible for enforcing it's own laws and public key crypto can effectively split the responsibility of verifying age and making sure only verified users have access.

paulddraper 3y ago

Wow this is really interesting suggestion. I'm firmly in the "porn and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race" camp. We require actual age verification for tobacco and alcohol. I don't see a reason not to require the same for porn. That said, I am interested in the most effective ways to keep tobacco, alcohol, and porn out of the hands of minors.

johngladtj 3y ago
We should not require it for those things either.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  Really? Twelve year old wants to buy a six pack and you say okay here you go kid.
moonchild 3y ago
I agree that widely available pornography has probably been a net negative for society. However: 1. I'm not convinced that it is markedly worse than other harmful content which is now widely available on the internet. 2. I don't think efficacy should be the primary consideration. For instance, mass censorship is rather effective, but clearly unconscionable. I'm not sure if you can make a cure which isn't worse than the disease.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  I imagine you can, given how bad the disease is.
DropInIn 3y ago
Unless you legislate age restriction on the Bible you can't reasonably argue for porn restriction... Images of consenting adults is a far cry less offensive and damaging than parables and stories explicitly stating girls should be fed to rape crazed mobs in order to protect "special guests", amoung many other horrors....

brightlancer 3y ago

> the right way to do this is to legislate that these sites add the RTA header to any domain/url that may have adult or user-generated content ... > A header is trivial to add, trivial to verify is active and the legal liability is then shifted to the parent as it is for everything else related to their child. No, you just said the web site is responsible for publishing the header, which means they have legal liability. Does HackerNews have "user-generated content"? Does it have to publish the same header as Pornhub? And as you later write: "In terms of bypassing, teens will bypass it but they can just visit sites that a database would never be enforced on in the first place." Exactly. That's also from the article: "In its Twitter statement, Pornhub alleged that a major problem with these laws is that states "are not regulating enforcement." This means that major platforms like Pornhub will likely comply with the laws voluntarily—or else risk fines of up to $1 million annually, the FSC estimated—while users seeking to avoid age verification will simply migrate over to seedier platforms that don't require ID and often pose security and privacy risks to users." IOW, it wouldn't work and would just be a way to go after mainstream websites that ran afoul of a politician.

sheepscreek 3y ago
> No, you just said the web site is responsible for publishing the header, which means they have legal liability. I can see the difference. Website has the liability for not adding the header. Parents have the liability for not “enforcing” checks on devices a child might use. It’s a clever proposal but more details will need to be thought through.
- manvillej 3y ago
  It incentivizes cooperation rather than punishing it. Seedier sites will be more liable while the implementation is negligible for sites that want to cooperate. The other solutions puts technological hurdles, additional points of failure, and liability on cooperating sites that will push away legal adult traffic from them to seedier sites.