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Age verification is incompatible with the internet
- toomuchtodo 3y agoThere are valid complaints to the idea being challenged, but it absolutely can be done technically and through legislation enforcing technical controls. Sophisticated users will use VPNs if they want to evade geoblocks, your average person won't (and any business that attempts to help them will be met with a legal hammer), and digital IDs are both reasonable and feasible to deploy at nation scale. Should it be used to govern access to adult content? A legislation issue! Sane technology legislation requires competent representatives. This is what folks voted for. Parenting responsibility in the aggregate, very broadly speaking, is not what it used to be. This is not to say that parents today are worse, but that standards and resources are different (two adults having to work full time, quality time per week between parent and child, ubiquitous access to social, screens, and internet, etc).
- vegetablepotpie 3y agoWe talk about legislative solutions as if they exist in a bubble. Like there’s some idealized body of completely rational actors who will deliberately evaluate all the features of an issue and make a decision that will benefit everyone in aggregate. This is not how legislatures work. They are filled with imperfect humans who rarely have technical training. They should not be making decisions in a bubble. In theory you could implement age based access controls, but as the article points out, these are full of tradeoffs, and none of them are good. You will either get vendor lock in, violations of constitutional rights, a wider dispersal of Personally identifiable information, or a poorly thought through government implemented solution whose only feedback is additional legislation. Parental desires to prevent children from seeing inappropriate content is not strictly opposed to individual free speech rights, the need for dynamism and open competition in the marketplace, or a need for privacy and information security. To say these issues need to be balanced would be a false dichotomy. Perhaps the solution is for society to respect parents by giving them the resources they need, through paid parental leave and employment protections.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- vlovich123 3y agoExcept the mDL specifically accounted for this and allows anonymous age verification records and it’s a standard so there’s no real lock in (there’s some on the provider side in terms of the IT systems to do the signing but that’s self inflicted in many ways). And the lock in described in that section that alludes to the mDL seems mostly like FUD - there’s no requirement you use a Google/Apple wallet. Indeed most of the pilot programs are starting with apps released by the motor licensing agency itself. Now there may be more “lock in” enforced to close loopholes for the really technically minded, but honestly this feels like a fine middle ground starting point.
- mewpmewp2 3y agoKids will just download shady software to get past all that. And if you block that, everything they want to do must be vetted even if they are 17.
- harimau777 3y agoIn the current US I don't think it's reasonable to believe that we can trust that something like digital IDs would not be abused. That does not necessarily mean that there are not other locations or times where that trust might be warranted. Specifically, it's likely that police and/or national security would use them in ways that would result in false arrests and/or chilling online behavior. It is also becoming increasingly likely that Christian Nationalists would use them to censor speech that they don't like and/or to persecute people that they disagree with.
- JohnMakin 3y agoParents and caretakers have the ability to restrict children’s content on any device a child has access to. The burden should be on them to ensure their child is not consuming porn. It shouldn’t be everyone else’s problem that people are unwilling to parent their children.
- times_trw 3y agoAnd what about producing porn? Do we arrest the parent or the child when the child posts a picture of their genitals on insta-snap?
- hulitu 3y agoBoth of them. Just to be sure. /s
- ajsnigrutin 3y agoYep, but some parents would like to shift responsibility to others (government,...), because the alternative is to actually be a parent to their kids.
- sanex 3y agoClearly not a parent
- soerxpso 3y agoYou can't expect parents to hover over their children 24/7. Apply the argument you're making to any other instance of corrupting minors. If you have sex with a 14 year old, you're not going to be able to say, "Well the kid's parents should have been watching him..." to the judge. The same applies to showing porn to one.
- insickness 3y agoThis is a straw man. Saying that the burden is on parents to ensure a child's safety doesn't mean a child molester is free from blame. You've taken his point and pushed it to the extreme.
- selimthegrim 3y agoTo borrow a slogan from Kathleen Blanco’s 2004 election campaign for governor against Bobby Jindal, “Wake up Louisiana before it’s too late!”
- texas2toss 3y agoAV is already widely utilized by thousands of internet companies and represents a significant market. The issue is the companies being targeted have simply chosen to not enact any AV or gating measures because it would impact their existing business. Additionally, the targeted companies have solutions available but are leveraging legal and lobbying efforts vs. changing their business. Source: I work for a company that distributes a widely used AV product.
- shkkmo 3y agoHow are users supposed to know where they can and can't safely upload a sensitive picture of their ID?
- texas2toss 3y agoThe vast majority (90%+)of all AV is not photo ID. It’s phone number or name/address (in the US), depending on the industry. This info is usually collected. For adult industry, the issue is gating web traffic. But as I explained to a regulator mentioned in the article, as long as there are shady companies who won’t comply and can’t be fined, it’s a moot point.
- shkkmo 3y agoPhone numbers? That seems like a bunch of security theater. (Edit: presumably that's why the states that have passed porn AV laws require IDs, not phone numbers.) > For adult industry, the issue is gating web traffic. Clealry that is not the only issue as adult sites have chosen to stop operating rather than comply in jurisdictions that require AV.
- stjohnswarts 3y agoThe adult sites will simply move offshore where the country trying to stop the flow of information doesn't have jurisdictions. It's whack-a-mole. The only solution is that parents control their kids, install nanny software, and teach them what is age appropriate. I chose to skip all that but supposedly I'm supposed to just accept that they are taking more of my freedom away and expect me to turn my ID over to random internet companies and trust that they'll "do the right thing"
- throwaway8877 3y agoIf every person can be identified uniquely and mapped to a real person, and this is what age verification will come down to, then each of us can be fed with different kind of bullshit, our thoughts can be even more easily manipulated systematically. That is the price to pay.
- texas2toss 3y agoIt is moving towards proof of uniqueness + age assurance. Eg: confidence score you are human + confidence score you are over X age.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Erratic6576 3y agoWe can also get automated real life punishments if our opinions threaten the perfection of our state quo
- _Parfait_ 3y agoAnd what's happening now?
- zen928 3y agoPeople like you having the certainty your freedom to casually engage in these types of topics that may be critical of powerful entities won't result in a form of specific targeting that gives a legally accepted pathway to finding out your private information. Or something.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gary_0 3y agoThis should not be that hard. How about: - At point of purchase for a consumer device that can view Internet content, the salesperson (or web store) is required to ask if the device is for an underage child, in which case either the device is placed in "child safe" mode, or printed instructions are directly provided giving instructions to do such. The child protection settings should be linked to the parent's e-mail address (so they can be lifted when the child is of age, or the device is given to someone else, etc). - Consumer devices must support filtering for underage users (they already do, although perhaps this could be made more standardized and easier to use). - Adult sites are required to list themselves as such so they can be filtered (they already do this quite voluntarily). Of course, this assumes that legislators are making these rules in good faith (I strongly suspect they are not, and thus they are actually unconstitutional attempts to restrict free speech).
- rany_ 3y ago> Adult sites are required to list themselves as such so they can be filtered (they already do this quite voluntarily). There's actually a meta tag that most adult sites set to do this already. It's also used by Google to identify a website as adult for SafeSearch reasons. The process seems simple enough, https://www.rtalabel.org/index.html?content=howto https://www.rtalabel.org/index.html?content=howto (meta tag) and https://www.rtalabel.org/index.html?content=howtofaq#apache https://www.rtalabel.org/index.html?content=howtofaq#apache (http header) It is strange web browsers don't take advantage of it, though. This combined with some kind of AI model would work in most cases I bet.
- thanhhaimai 3y ago
- stupidadd 3y ago[dead]
- betaby 3y agoKids can purchase unrestricted amount of sugar drinks and ruin their health for the rest of their lives. I insist government implements age verification for soda purchases. All sodas must be accessible to 21+ years only.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoA state in Mexico did this [1] [2] [3] with positive results (junk food). It's a good idea. If you can get it passed in the US, you have my PAC dollars/dark money and vote. Sometimes "think of the children" really is think of the children. > One-third of Mexicans aged 6 to 19 are overweight or obese, according to UNICEF. They may not be disproportionately affected by COVID-19 now, but they can suffer myriad health issues, especially in adulthood. [2] (for comparison, 20% of children in the US are obese [4]) [1] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/14/912029399/we-had-to-take-action-states-in-mexico-move-to-ban-junk-food-sales-to-minors https://www.npr.org/2020/09/14/912029399/we-had-to-take-acti... [2] https://twitter.com/CongresoOaxaca_/status/1291080496303222786 https://twitter.com/CongresoOaxaca_/status/12910804963032227... [3] https://twitter.com/Magaly_LopezOax/status/1291084819561172992 https://twitter.com/Magaly_LopezOax/status/12910848195611729... [4] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/childhood/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/childhood/index.html
- hollerith 3y agoOK, I'm on board.
- o11c 3y agoThis, but unironically. ... though it probably shouldn't use the same age cutoff as beer. 18 or even 15 would be better. The downside is that - even with mild enforcement - fast food would get even more expensive for people who buy the cheap items which are currently subsidized by drinks.
- TobyTheDog123 3y agoI feel like a lot of the comments here are said ironically but would actually be wonderful for much of society. Very tired of the libertarian arguments when they obviously don't work.
- usrusr 3y agoSomething like that parody of printed manual check copy protection on the original Larry game might actually work? Years later I had a huge "oh, so that's the answer!" moment when I finally discovered the meaning of the words agent orange. Jokes aside, what would be the failure mode if some metadata about audience minimum age was given legal blessing? Regular browsers would simply ignore it, browsers with enabled parental controls would reject the page or site. Vendors of parental controls could focus their efforts on suppressing those sites that lie and the numerous proxy services that would inevitably pop up (but that's a problem they already have I assume). What am I missing?
- alright2565 3y ago> if some metadata about audience minimum age was given legal blessing? There's no legal blessing for this, but there's already an industry standard (in the vein of the ESRB ratings): https://www.rtalabel.org/index.html?content=howto https://www.rtalabel.org/index.html?content=howto Most porn sites have already voluntarily applied this label. > What am I missing? My best explanation is that moral panic always plays well to voters.
- bee_rider 3y agoI disagree with the idea of censorship generally, but it would be extremely funny if this was implemented and we could all just start tagging all our (totally mundane) content as adult-only. Imagine, a whole parallel internet free of busybodies and their children.
- johannes1234321 3y ago> What am I missing? You are missing, that many people in that space don't want to solve that specific problem * Some companies and their lobbies want to sell their products for filtering or whatever * Some people want to get rid of all sinful porn * Some want to block a lot more content for more people and need infrastructure * Some want to have further control Etc. "protecting the children" is often a good way to denounce opponents
- joe_g_young 3y ago
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- TheRealPomax 3y ago[flagged]
- huytersd 3y agoSouth Korea has been doing it for years. To get on the internet, you need to sign in with your ID.
- stjohnswarts 3y agoSounds like fascism to me. More like what N. Korea does, you'd think that S. Korea would be averse to adding more fascism to their lives rather than less.
- Barrin92 3y agoThis is another article that tries to turn what is a subjective political grievance into a technical discussion. Age verification by id in fairly privacy preserving ways is technically trivial. I've lived in South Korea where this is standard and digital identification is used for everything. My German national id has an eid feature that you can use, for example when buying booze online to verify your age. There's a dedicated public company set up for this, so the vendor only gets a yes/no. That's much, much better than typing your personal information into some random website from a privacy standpoint. It's better to have verification behind a dedicated API abiding by some standards than the "type everying into the webform and pray" status quo. And as a sidenote on the cultural issue itself. I have no problem with porn or drinking etc, but when I go into a store for anything adult related someone at the door asks me for my id. Idk why people make a fuzz about having some basic due dilligence in digital marketplaces. Cinemas need to make sure people who attend adult movies are of age, bar owners need to make sure underaged kids don't order drinks. This is a completely reasonable level of responsiblity on business owners.
- creer 3y agoHow do the german users expect that "dedicated public company" not to pass on the data? "As provided by law, I'm sure /s"
- Barrin92 3y agoI mean, yes as provided by law. I live in a civilization, not in a jungle. Same reason I trust that I can eat the piece of meat I buy in the supermarket and it isn't full of salmonella, there's laws making sure it's processed correctly. I trust the law every time I walk across the street intersection.
- anjel 3y agoThis would only revive the porn mag industry
- anonzzzies 3y agoWhich indeed every underage kid in the 80s/90s had access to. Later on smut dvd rips were traded in our school. Internet is vastly harder to regulate than that, forget about it.
- stjohnswarts 3y agoIt's up to parents to lock down their kids from tech they shouldn't be accessing, the rest of us shouldn't be harassed and inconvenienced for that. I hate to beat a dead horse, but it comes down to personal responsibility, "what are your kids doing right now?"
- anonzzzies 3y agoA lot of countries (like NL, ES, PT, BE,…) have state owned APIs which have a central login (with 2FA) could easily just return yep or nay when asked; is this person over 18. Without violating privacy by the porn site and not anymore violating at least than the gov site already does or doesn’t in your opinion. The site wouldn’t have to know anything about who you are; it would work like 3dsecure. I am not for it but it wouldn’t be hard to do in countries like that; I guess the US doesn’t have / want this? Like a state owned social security login site?
- junofan 3y agoWhat you’re describing is an automated system for the government to control information shared between two private parties. We don’t have that here.
- andreareina 3y agoSo now the government knows you're visiting this particular site.
- anonzzzies 3y agoYeah, like said, i'm not for it, but it beats, as far as i'm concerned, uploading your id + some camera to every 3rdparty that 'needs verification'. I don't mistrust my gov (as much as I do porn site owners, marketers etc), if I did, I would (and will if it ever gets there) move.
- ianburrell 3y agoThe API doesn’t need to include the site. The identity site just needs to verify age and return token that can be passed to site. Lots of identity protocols like OAuth have the provider do the redirect so they know the site. Which makes sense cause they want to validate the site. But it works to have the app do the redirect. They end up passing the token to the sire.
- lessbergstein 3y agoThen maybe porn shouldn't be available on the Internet
- tomjen3 3y agoYeah but unfortunately it is very compatible with social conservatives and certain extreme christians who want to make it as hard as possible for adults to access porn as well, ideally banning it. Thats not possible to do, so they go and attack it with fake outrage (and it are all fake, children are not actually interested in sex nor do they spontainously combust if they see naked adults). Same with exedus cry, which is not about "saving adult performers" but about making it harder and harder to run a porn site.
- ttyprintk 3y agoThe article does get into this, and I think the truth is between the article and your analysis: I personally think that the libertarian argument is good: the government should focus on things other than this. Which means devices could enact opt-in controls. Periodically scanning screenshots for nudity? That’s a feature… for an app. You’ve got all the right filtering apps? You’re a compliant semi-trustworthy teenager/Christian/Muslim/Exodus Cry member/citizen of the state religion. Parental controls keep the apps activated. A computer with 1995 Netscape continues to work with arbitrary Internet content. git and Docker don’t pause for AV when a comment contains the string “XXX”. What you’re talking about are the movements behind the blockers. We can imagine an app which targets “sin” rather than nudity. Detecting corrosive text stories, especially homoeroticism. That this is merely very approximate detecting false positives is a feature, not a bug. One can’t be too careful with the intentions of outsiders. That the app itself collects more PII than the zero-knowledge proofs explained here is not interesting to its market; they already give superlative trust to those app makers. Perfectly acceptable to be carefree with the intentions of insiders. Parents get a device that sanitizes as much as they want. Religious communities get to bless smartphones as finally advancing their fight against sin. The opt-in apps stay out of the way of well-adjusted busy people. I’m ok with that scenario but I predict it requires a committed user base, patience with false detections, sustained funding, noticeable battery impact, and empowers some speciality app makers to be morality custodians. I’m less ok with one government getting all that right across a global communications network, even for the worst content. But lawmakers who want control don’t like those apps. They want (1) the effects to be broadly distributed, (2) that the gatekeepers be hyperactive invite-only groups on social media, (3) that those volunteer ratings boards promote certain tastes over others. Song of Solomon must never be blocked. A reference to a torrent that contains a gay furry story? AV the entire domain, read the story into the Congressional Record, AV the Congressional Record. Obviously hyperbole, but my point is that these are the contours of what a minority want with power. This comment section is full of people who want one government to make parenting choices for all, but as quoted in the article about the lawmaker from Utah, the censors are shockingly bad at predicting the future. We have to scrutinize their implementations when all proposed solutions depend on a powerful government intervening past the HTTP header level whenever someone finds inadequate supervision within any particular open forum.
- MattPalmer1086 3y agoIt is possible to cryptographically attest to attributes like age without revealing identity. I worked on a privacy preserving system that did this among other things. Third parties who received an attestation of some property could verify it. To be fully private, a bit more is required. Crucially, each time an attestation is provided it is made unlinkable to previous times it may have been provided. So the third party only knows the attestation they have just received is valid, but not that it is the same unknown person they saw yesterday.
- ohlokkru 3y agoYou know what else preserves privacy? Not giving all our information to data driven businesses just to exist.
- isthatafact 3y agoI do not expect that I could ever trust the 3rd party. And any on-device "private solution" seems unlikely to be implemented in a provably secure and safe way. Besides that, why is any of that complicated stuff even needed? I know my age, and I am able to verify my age without involving any 3rd party, software, AI etc. If someone else wants to lie about their age, I am not convinced that I should need to jump through hoops and give away my own privacy as part of any of the flawed schemes supposedly intended to prevent that, as some governments are trying to push.
- creer 3y agoIt would be possible. But age verification and privacy are not the objective of either side. Age verification as a pretext to place a barrier and stick it to these businesses. Privacy as a principle - not a technical attribute.
- acd 3y agoThe issue I have with age verification and End user agreements is the following. There is no legal binding to who signed the Eula in normal end user accept. This differs from a paper contract where the signature is person identifiable. Your cats paw could have clicked on the Eula accept :). Who is liable then the cat? I think that if Eulas was taken to highest court of law they may not hold through screening.
- cyanydeez 3y agojust figure out how to make a EULA a chain in abortion and that'll get it to the US supreme Court
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- miellaby 3y agoBeyond all the hystery around this topic, I feel like blocking porn site to minors is a reasonable requirement and it can be done with no privacy concern neither on the site side nor on the government side. It's a straightforward usage of basic crypto tools. Says: - the porn site creates a challenge and send it to the browser. - the browser goes to the governmental service where one uses tax ID or the like to prove age. The service returns a challenge answer encoded with the government private key - the browser goes back to the porn site with the answer. The porn site uses the public key to decode the governmental response and validate it does correspond to the challenge. As I see it, theres no PII that the site can get, no history leak on the government side, no excessive centralisation, nothing frighting really. Do I miss something?
- grayhatter 3y ago> Do I miss something? The point of the article? The idea that I shouldn't have to ask my government for permission to view information/media? The fact that this absolutely will doxx your privacy to the government? I'm all for, "wont somebody think of the children", but IMO protecting children is a 'solved' problem. When a child runs into the street we blame the parents, we don't install gates down every sidewalk. When a kid is seen riding a bike without a helmet, again, we don't decide that you need to send your government a selfie before the tires unlock. Sites do have a responsibility to ensure people don't misuse their content. But liquor stores only ask for ID when you try to buy a dangerous substance, they don't make you ask your government for permission. And that works flawlessly, fake IDs definitely aren't a thing, and I'm sure the same applies to this online ID thing. Edit: I had 2nd thoughts about this because I don't like to make slippery slope arguments but this one seems worthy of consideration at the very least. Once this exists, all sites dealing with fraud will start to use it. Which Will have a DOS effect on government servers, which means they will try to mitigate it by requiring the requesting site provide a site ID and unique ID for the request. So much for any of the features that people expect might protect some privacy.
- takinola 3y ago> The fact that this absolutely will doxx your privacy to the government? Done properly this will not reveal your online behavior to the government any more than using your government issued ID card to enter a bar leaks your location to the issuing party. Now, whether governments should have the right to restrict access to certain types of information and media based on age is a different question
- tiberius_p 3y agoJust have the user calculate an average difficulty integral. If he/she succeeds they are of legal age or very close to it. Even if they use Wolfram Alpha that still denotes some level of maturity which is consistent with legal age.
- toasted-subs 3y agoIdentity verification is incompatible with the internet