10 ms·

What if you had to show Government ID whenever you entered a grocery store, a library, a movie theater? What if you were tracked each time you consumed a video

What if you had to show Government ID whenever you entered a grocery store, a library, a movie theater? What if you were tracked each time you consumed a video, a still image, an audio clip, or even a text message? What if the government kept a record of any or all of those checks? What if they arranged for third parties to commercialize that data so they could 'legally' end-run any restriction on domestic spying with a small ad targeting data service fee? This is the sort of dystopia that librarians and others focused on liberty have been fighting for what seems like forever.

hulitu 3y ago
> What if you were tracked each time you consumed a video, a still image, an audio clip, or even a text message? You already are.
- koonsolo 3y ago
  And I would say if you carry a cellphone, they also know where you go physically.
slibhb 3y ago
If you extend this policy to "consuming a video/image/text message," that would be dystopian. But this is about porn. Maybe it'll be a slippery slope but I doubt it. I wouldn't vote for this policy but I get it. Lots of people don't want kids watching porn. And it's not just social conservativism, people across the political spectrum think porn is addictive, psychologically damaging, and leads to sexual dysfunction.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  > If you extend this policy to "consuming a video/image/text message," that would be dystopian. But this is about porn Eho decides what is porn? There is portln on Twitter, will all of twitter be monitored? Kids suicides inceased 10x because they arent alliwed to go outside any more and have no friends - if we actually cared about kuds we'd be solving that. Western boomers grew up in a better world than kids today “Our thesis is that a primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children & teens to play, roam, & engage in other activities independent of direct oversight & control by adults.” license to walk home alone from school dropped from 86% in 1971 to 35% in 1990 and 25% in 2010, and license to use public buses alone dropped from 48% in 1971 to 15% in 1990 to 12% in 2010.11 Homework, which was once rare or nonexistent in elementary school, is now common even in kindergarten. One study revealed that the average amount of time that US children in school, ages 6-8 years, spent at school plus school homework increased by 11.4 hours per week between 1981 and 2003, equivalent to adding a day and half to an adult’s work week. those who could play freely in neighborhoods spent, on average, twice as much time outdoors, were much more active while outdoors, had more than twice as many friends, and had better motor and social skills than those deprived of such play"
  - defrost 3y ago
    > Kids suicides inceased 10x because ... What country, which ages, and when? That didn't happen in either the USofA nor Australia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Crude_US_suicide_rate_by_age_1981-2016.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Crude_US_suicide_rate_by_... https://viz.aihw.gov.au/t/Public/views/CoD_Tableaus_2022/S6a_CHLDTrend01?%3Aembed=y&%3AisGuestRedirectFromVizportal=y https://viz.aihw.gov.au/t/Public/views/CoD_Tableaus_2022/S6a... as "10x" would imply suicides per 100,000 rose from ~10 per 100K to ~100 per 100K (depending on country | age bracket, etc).
- ethanbond 3y ago
  I mean a town in Tennessee recently outlawed homosexuality in public. I can easily see this being applied to anything with LGBT material, sexual or not. That said, yeah, I get the motivation. I put this in a similar category as the regulatory response to Airbnb/Ubers of the world: it seems like a better outcome may have been possible if the companies didn’t totally and flagrantly shirk their social obligations to begin with.
  - estarkio 3y ago
    Now I want someone to start The Church of Jesus Christ, Drag Queen, and say that reading the gospel to children is the Lord's calling and a religious requirement.
  - sqrt_1 3y ago
    I don't think a town in Tennessee recently outlawed homosexuality in public, They just added: "No person shall knowingly while in a public space engage in indecent behavior, display, distribute, or broadcast indecent material, conduct indecent events, or facilitate any of the foregoing prohibited acts." Problem was that the referenced indecent statue definition included homosexuality, which was then removed from the definition even before it blew up on social media https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2023/11/22/tennessee-citys-ban-on-public-homosexuality-was-lifted-fact-check/71670425007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2023/11/22/ten... https://www.politifact.com/article/2023/nov/28/did-a-city-in-tennessee-ban-being-gay-in-public-it/ https://www.politifact.com/article/2023/nov/28/did-a-city-in...
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      It was removed in response to a lawsuit. Strictly speaking, yes they did recently outlaw being gay, but it was (allegedly) due to forgetting to change a statute definition rather than expanding it. I guess they get kudos for removing “homosexuality” from the definition of “indecent acts” in 2023! In any case, the question is whether there’s reason to believe this will be a slippery slope. There’s obviously a pattern of increasing moral regulation throughout the country including book bans. That this particular instance of moral regulation was a bit complicated in its implementation and (allegedly) accidentally overzealous in its scope doesn’t negate the trend.
- boppo1 3y ago
  If I like BDSM, and that is cataloged, I can easily see that being leveraged against me. We should focus on tools and systems that empower parents to guide their childrens' internet experience. Maybe a token of some sort sites can use to self identify as 18+ so parents can set up strong filters.
  - maxbond 3y ago
    I mean, just talk to your kids about sex. You're not going to succeed in censoring their internet activity. Any more than you'll succeed in stopping them from sneaking out and going to parties or drinking with their friends - did your parents try to stop you from sneaking out? Did it work? Because I got really good at scaling fences and climbing out of windows. But in the effort you will send the message that there is no trust between you and your child, and they won't feel safe talking to you should they need to. If you take the attitude that sex is something illicit, they will take the message that it's something to keep secret from you.
  - stephen_g 3y ago
    There is already one - it’s called RTA (‘Restricted to Adults’) and is a meta tag that should filter out sites if you have parental controls enabled. I expect it’s one of the things Google etc. look at for SafeSearch to remove those results too (among other checks). Of course, the irony is that only those that would label their sites as RTA already (so are already easily filtered) would comply with any ID requirement, so these kinds of laws achieve very little!
- maxbond 3y ago
  > [P]eople across the political spectrum think porn is addictive, psychologically damaging, and leads to sexual dysfunction. I think everyone acknowledges it can be, but it's a pretty distinct cohort that holds it necessarily is. Definitely not that it inevitably leads to sexual dysfunction, that's just patently untrue. Most adults consume pornography, and for the vast majority of them it isn't a problem. Every adult who's sex life I know anything about, watches porn. They're fine.
  - User23 3y ago
    > Most adults consume pornography, and for the vast majority of them it isn't a problem. Got a source for this? Because everything I look at suggests that much like alcohol, a relatively small number of habitual users account for the vast majority of consumption.
    - maxbond 3y ago
      Not to hand. That's my belief from my observation. I looked for statistics for about 10 minutes, but didn't really find good information. I suspect this area is under researched. Happy to look at any sources you want to link. Both of these can be true, however. I imagine most adults sometimes drink alcohol too. Personally I might go weeks or months without watching porn, it's not something I generally do everyday. People who do would blow my usage out of the water (which, to be clear, is fine, you do you). As a thought experiment - we all agree that lots of people watch porn, right? So if it leads to addiction or sexual dysfunction at even a rate of 1% or 2%, that would be an epidemic. If there are tens of millions of porn consumers in the US (which I think is very conservative), we'd expect hundreds of thousands of people to develop issues. So - where are they? Do we have a source for that?
      - shadowgovt 3y ago
        You know, the organizations most likely to have that information are the ones with the big data on access and source IP address, who could make an educated guess on the scale and variety of consumers of pornography. ... In other words, PornHub.
- notatoad 3y ago
  "porn" is poorly defined and has definitely been used to censor things before that aren't necessarily pornography. whether or not you agree with the blocking of that sort of content, supporting these sort of restrictions on pornography means supporting a policy that lets the government gate content they deem objectionable behind an id check. i guarantee you there's at least some content out there that you're not going to agree with the government's definition of pornography. or even if you agree with the current government on all their content moderation choices, you might not agree with the next one.
gedy 3y ago
> What if you were tracked each time you consumed a video, a still image, an audio clip, or even a text message? I mean you mostly are already
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
While I strongly disagree with this NC law, and others, your analogy is a bad one. As a society I think we've accepted that some things (cigarettes, alcohol, sex, etc.) should be restricted from children. That's a far cry from requiring ID every time I go to the grocery store. But, as long as I've been alive, you have had to show ID to purchase alcohol, and the sky hasn't fallen. Again, I think these types of laws are particularly poorly thought out, but I don't buy the "slippery slope into dystopia" arguments, and I think there are better arguments against it.
- ImpostorKeanu 3y ago
  The core of OPs argument is that tracking is bad, not that ID/age verification is bad.
- hattmall 3y ago
  You had to show ID to buy porn magazines, go in a strip club or even the adult video rental room. It's pretty insane that we have no check for an unlimited amount of free porn with all kinds of extremes. It fucks up a lot of kids (and adults). Showing porn to a random kid on the street would have you catch a charge if not something worse, but somehow on the Internet it's just fine?
  - kazinator 3y ago
    > You had to show ID to buy porn magazines Not to someone wearing a Google Glass device, taking a snapshot of it.
  - networkchad 3y ago
    [dead]
  - whatshisface 3y ago
    They are leaving it out where anyone can get it (if their parents aren't watching), not showing it to unsuspecting pedestrians. Maybe teenagers have too much autonomy online but it's the place of their parents to take it away from them - not the state of North Carolina.
cryptonector 3y ago
[flagged]
sneak 3y ago
You have to show government-ID-linked payment card information to shop at most shops in airports, or to buy plane tickets. Most people use a SIM card that is tied to same. Their web activity is similarly tied to ID. Most USians voluntarily provide that payment card (with full name in the magstripe) whenever they shop at a grocery store or movie theater. I’m not sure why people think this sort of surveillance isn’t occurring. We’ve known since before Snowden that the feds have been receiving this data in bulk in realtime for decades.
brettgo1 3y ago
Thank god for those librarians fighting for our liberty. Read a book everyone!
- konfusinomicon 3y ago
  don't tread on books
paulddraper 3y ago
> What if you had to show Government ID whenever you entered a grocery store, a library, a movie theater? What if you had to show Government ID whenever you entered a bar, a strip club, or a (R-rated) movie theatre?
harry8 3y ago
>What if you had to show Government ID whenever you entered a grocery store, a library, a movie theater? What if you were tracked each time you consumed a video, a still image, an audio clip, or even a text message? 1) entered a grocery store - No, at least not since peak-pandemic. Face recognition? 2) a library - Yes, to borrow books or on demand from security. Needed govt. id to get a library card. 3) movie theatre - Yes, mine no longer takes cash. 4) tracked each time you consumed a video - Yes. Every single streaming service. 5) a still image - Everything on the web. Every book w/ photos I buy. Can hypothetically still look at books we own, was given, found, lent, pirated or stole in privacy. 6) Audio - spotify, youtube etc. 7) a text message - Your phone IS a device you pay for and maintain which is designed and regulated to spy on you. Signal is the only possibility for any privacy at all here. >This is the sort of dystopia that librarians and others focused on liberty have been fighting for what seems like forever. How is that fight going, do you think? A Turnkey totalitarian state exists, who is going to turn that key?
- cf1241290841 3y ago
  >A Turnkey totalitarian state exists, who is going to turn that key? A totalitarian that will be recognized as such. The plausible deniability of the status quo is worth quite a bit.
  - hatenberg 3y ago
    Oh I think a certain presidential candidate is running under the “let’s stop pretending” thing. So in half a year we’ll know.
    - cf1241290841 3y ago
      I dont see the "Look there a three headed monkey" type of tribalism distraction to be a future proof plan. The attention economy overdid it. And corruption bloomed as a result. Which is typical for a totalitarian rise. Kleptocracies without checks and balances dont work and its quite visible to the outside. Its just not a sensible path to go down on. Even looking past ethical and human perspective, totalitarianism is at its core dysfunctional.

hulitu 3y ago

> What if you were tracked each time you consumed a video, a still image, an audio clip, or even a text message? You already are.

koonsolo 3y ago
And I would say if you carry a cellphone, they also know where you go physically.

slibhb 3y ago

If you extend this policy to "consuming a video/image/text message," that would be dystopian. But this is about porn. Maybe it'll be a slippery slope but I doubt it. I wouldn't vote for this policy but I get it. Lots of people don't want kids watching porn. And it's not just social conservativism, people across the political spectrum think porn is addictive, psychologically damaging, and leads to sexual dysfunction.

ClumsyPilot 3y ago
> If you extend this policy to "consuming a video/image/text message," that would be dystopian. But this is about porn Eho decides what is porn? There is portln on Twitter, will all of twitter be monitored? Kids suicides inceased 10x because they arent alliwed to go outside any more and have no friends - if we actually cared about kuds we'd be solving that. Western boomers grew up in a better world than kids today “Our thesis is that a primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children & teens to play, roam, & engage in other activities independent of direct oversight & control by adults.” license to walk home alone from school dropped from 86% in 1971 to 35% in 1990 and 25% in 2010, and license to use public buses alone dropped from 48% in 1971 to 15% in 1990 to 12% in 2010.11 Homework, which was once rare or nonexistent in elementary school, is now common even in kindergarten. One study revealed that the average amount of time that US children in school, ages 6-8 years, spent at school plus school homework increased by 11.4 hours per week between 1981 and 2003, equivalent to adding a day and half to an adult’s work week. those who could play freely in neighborhoods spent, on average, twice as much time outdoors, were much more active while outdoors, had more than twice as many friends, and had better motor and social skills than those deprived of such play"
- defrost 3y ago
  > Kids suicides inceased 10x because ... What country, which ages, and when? That didn't happen in either the USofA nor Australia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Crude_US_suicide_rate_by_age_1981-2016.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Crude_US_suicide_rate_by_... https://viz.aihw.gov.au/t/Public/views/CoD_Tableaus_2022/S6a_CHLDTrend01?%3Aembed=y&%3AisGuestRedirectFromVizportal=y https://viz.aihw.gov.au/t/Public/views/CoD_Tableaus_2022/S6a... as "10x" would imply suicides per 100,000 rose from ~10 per 100K to ~100 per 100K (depending on country | age bracket, etc).
ethanbond 3y ago
I mean a town in Tennessee recently outlawed homosexuality in public. I can easily see this being applied to anything with LGBT material, sexual or not. That said, yeah, I get the motivation. I put this in a similar category as the regulatory response to Airbnb/Ubers of the world: it seems like a better outcome may have been possible if the companies didn’t totally and flagrantly shirk their social obligations to begin with.
- estarkio 3y ago
  Now I want someone to start The Church of Jesus Christ, Drag Queen, and say that reading the gospel to children is the Lord's calling and a religious requirement.
- sqrt_1 3y ago
  I don't think a town in Tennessee recently outlawed homosexuality in public, They just added: "No person shall knowingly while in a public space engage in indecent behavior, display, distribute, or broadcast indecent material, conduct indecent events, or facilitate any of the foregoing prohibited acts." Problem was that the referenced indecent statue definition included homosexuality, which was then removed from the definition even before it blew up on social media https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2023/11/22/tennessee-citys-ban-on-public-homosexuality-was-lifted-fact-check/71670425007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2023/11/22/ten... https://www.politifact.com/article/2023/nov/28/did-a-city-in-tennessee-ban-being-gay-in-public-it/ https://www.politifact.com/article/2023/nov/28/did-a-city-in...
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    It was removed in response to a lawsuit. Strictly speaking, yes they did recently outlaw being gay, but it was (allegedly) due to forgetting to change a statute definition rather than expanding it. I guess they get kudos for removing “homosexuality” from the definition of “indecent acts” in 2023! In any case, the question is whether there’s reason to believe this will be a slippery slope. There’s obviously a pattern of increasing moral regulation throughout the country including book bans. That this particular instance of moral regulation was a bit complicated in its implementation and (allegedly) accidentally overzealous in its scope doesn’t negate the trend.
boppo1 3y ago
If I like BDSM, and that is cataloged, I can easily see that being leveraged against me. We should focus on tools and systems that empower parents to guide their childrens' internet experience. Maybe a token of some sort sites can use to self identify as 18+ so parents can set up strong filters.
- maxbond 3y ago
  I mean, just talk to your kids about sex. You're not going to succeed in censoring their internet activity. Any more than you'll succeed in stopping them from sneaking out and going to parties or drinking with their friends - did your parents try to stop you from sneaking out? Did it work? Because I got really good at scaling fences and climbing out of windows. But in the effort you will send the message that there is no trust between you and your child, and they won't feel safe talking to you should they need to. If you take the attitude that sex is something illicit, they will take the message that it's something to keep secret from you.
- stephen_g 3y ago
  There is already one - it’s called RTA (‘Restricted to Adults’) and is a meta tag that should filter out sites if you have parental controls enabled. I expect it’s one of the things Google etc. look at for SafeSearch to remove those results too (among other checks). Of course, the irony is that only those that would label their sites as RTA already (so are already easily filtered) would comply with any ID requirement, so these kinds of laws achieve very little!
maxbond 3y ago
> [P]eople across the political spectrum think porn is addictive, psychologically damaging, and leads to sexual dysfunction. I think everyone acknowledges it can be, but it's a pretty distinct cohort that holds it necessarily is. Definitely not that it inevitably leads to sexual dysfunction, that's just patently untrue. Most adults consume pornography, and for the vast majority of them it isn't a problem. Every adult who's sex life I know anything about, watches porn. They're fine.
- User23 3y ago
  > Most adults consume pornography, and for the vast majority of them it isn't a problem. Got a source for this? Because everything I look at suggests that much like alcohol, a relatively small number of habitual users account for the vast majority of consumption.
  - maxbond 3y ago
    Not to hand. That's my belief from my observation. I looked for statistics for about 10 minutes, but didn't really find good information. I suspect this area is under researched. Happy to look at any sources you want to link. Both of these can be true, however. I imagine most adults sometimes drink alcohol too. Personally I might go weeks or months without watching porn, it's not something I generally do everyday. People who do would blow my usage out of the water (which, to be clear, is fine, you do you). As a thought experiment - we all agree that lots of people watch porn, right? So if it leads to addiction or sexual dysfunction at even a rate of 1% or 2%, that would be an epidemic. If there are tens of millions of porn consumers in the US (which I think is very conservative), we'd expect hundreds of thousands of people to develop issues. So - where are they? Do we have a source for that?
    - shadowgovt 3y ago
      You know, the organizations most likely to have that information are the ones with the big data on access and source IP address, who could make an educated guess on the scale and variety of consumers of pornography. ... In other words, PornHub.
notatoad 3y ago
"porn" is poorly defined and has definitely been used to censor things before that aren't necessarily pornography. whether or not you agree with the blocking of that sort of content, supporting these sort of restrictions on pornography means supporting a policy that lets the government gate content they deem objectionable behind an id check. i guarantee you there's at least some content out there that you're not going to agree with the government's definition of pornography. or even if you agree with the current government on all their content moderation choices, you might not agree with the next one.

gedy 3y ago

> What if you were tracked each time you consumed a video, a still image, an audio clip, or even a text message? I mean you mostly are already

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

While I strongly disagree with this NC law, and others, your analogy is a bad one. As a society I think we've accepted that some things (cigarettes, alcohol, sex, etc.) should be restricted from children. That's a far cry from requiring ID every time I go to the grocery store. But, as long as I've been alive, you have had to show ID to purchase alcohol, and the sky hasn't fallen. Again, I think these types of laws are particularly poorly thought out, but I don't buy the "slippery slope into dystopia" arguments, and I think there are better arguments against it.

ImpostorKeanu 3y ago
The core of OPs argument is that tracking is bad, not that ID/age verification is bad.
hattmall 3y ago
You had to show ID to buy porn magazines, go in a strip club or even the adult video rental room. It's pretty insane that we have no check for an unlimited amount of free porn with all kinds of extremes. It fucks up a lot of kids (and adults). Showing porn to a random kid on the street would have you catch a charge if not something worse, but somehow on the Internet it's just fine?
- kazinator 3y ago
  > You had to show ID to buy porn magazines Not to someone wearing a Google Glass device, taking a snapshot of it.
- networkchad 3y ago
  [dead]
- whatshisface 3y ago
  They are leaving it out where anyone can get it (if their parents aren't watching), not showing it to unsuspecting pedestrians. Maybe teenagers have too much autonomy online but it's the place of their parents to take it away from them - not the state of North Carolina.

cryptonector 3y ago

[flagged]

sneak 3y ago

You have to show government-ID-linked payment card information to shop at most shops in airports, or to buy plane tickets. Most people use a SIM card that is tied to same. Their web activity is similarly tied to ID. Most USians voluntarily provide that payment card (with full name in the magstripe) whenever they shop at a grocery store or movie theater. I’m not sure why people think this sort of surveillance isn’t occurring. We’ve known since before Snowden that the feds have been receiving this data in bulk in realtime for decades.

brettgo1 3y ago

Thank god for those librarians fighting for our liberty. Read a book everyone!

konfusinomicon 3y ago
don't tread on books

paulddraper 3y ago

> What if you had to show Government ID whenever you entered a grocery store, a library, a movie theater? What if you had to show Government ID whenever you entered a bar, a strip club, or a (R-rated) movie theatre?

harry8 3y ago

>What if you had to show Government ID whenever you entered a grocery store, a library, a movie theater? What if you were tracked each time you consumed a video, a still image, an audio clip, or even a text message? 1) entered a grocery store - No, at least not since peak-pandemic. Face recognition? 2) a library - Yes, to borrow books or on demand from security. Needed govt. id to get a library card. 3) movie theatre - Yes, mine no longer takes cash. 4) tracked each time you consumed a video - Yes. Every single streaming service. 5) a still image - Everything on the web. Every book w/ photos I buy. Can hypothetically still look at books we own, was given, found, lent, pirated or stole in privacy. 6) Audio - spotify, youtube etc. 7) a text message - Your phone IS a device you pay for and maintain which is designed and regulated to spy on you. Signal is the only possibility for any privacy at all here. >This is the sort of dystopia that librarians and others focused on liberty have been fighting for what seems like forever. How is that fight going, do you think? A Turnkey totalitarian state exists, who is going to turn that key?

cf1241290841 3y ago
>A Turnkey totalitarian state exists, who is going to turn that key? A totalitarian that will be recognized as such. The plausible deniability of the status quo is worth quite a bit.
- hatenberg 3y ago
  Oh I think a certain presidential candidate is running under the “let’s stop pretending” thing. So in half a year we’ll know.
  - cf1241290841 3y ago
    I dont see the "Look there a three headed monkey" type of tribalism distraction to be a future proof plan. The attention economy overdid it. And corruption bloomed as a result. Which is typical for a totalitarian rise. Kleptocracies without checks and balances dont work and its quite visible to the outside. Its just not a sensible path to go down on. Even looking past ethical and human perspective, totalitarianism is at its core dysfunctional.