6 ms·

California could require age verification to visit porn sites

39 points by matrix87 2y ago

whythre 2y ago
Same style of crap the Brits are trying. More invasive garbage to saddle end users with, rather than properly vet and regulate the industry.
- wakawaka28 2y ago
  The Brits are doing way worse things. There's no way to limit porn sites to adults without demanding intrusive information. Most people want privacy when looking at porn, for good reason, and that's incompatible with age limits. If you ask me, this is just a warmup to a broad attack on internet anonymity. Politicians want it to be literally impossible to be anonymous on the internet, so they can harrass their opposition.
VincentEvans 2y ago
North Carolina has the same law already in effect.
- ranger_danger 2y ago
  At least 8 states do, and more are actively trying.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
These laws are the ultimate in stupidity. Starting to feel conspiratorial that VPN companies are just bribing legislators to pass these laws. Makes much more sense to require sites to adhere to things like "Restricted to Adults" labeling, https://www.rtalabel.org/ https://www.rtalabel.org/, so that they can be appropriately blocked by parental filters.
throwaway115 2y ago
What's the steelman argument for this being a slippery slope? I can't think of one.
- jmole 2y ago
  I can't tell if you're asking for an argument against this proposal or for it.
- RpFLCL 2y ago
  I think there's an obvious slippery slope here, and it's visible in how these sorts of age verification requirements are implemented. Specifically, requiring a government ID to access, creating a log of who/what/where/when. The slippery slope comes from someone then asking the question: "Well, we already require an ID to allow someone to access porn... so can we require it for other things online where people have less desire for privacy? Why shouldn't we require an ID to post to social media, or participate in online video games (especially those violent ones!)" The slope I see, is once you set up a system for ID verification and require it for a primary thing people want to keep private, it becomes easier to mandate it in other areas where privacy is less demanded. Concern about that slope would be a nonissue if the laws mandated adult sites tag themselves as "adult content" for trivial filtering at the household network level, instead of establishing and normalizing the ID verification regime.
- avidiax 2y ago
  Mandates of any kind tend to have inertia: once the mandate is in place, the government/corporate apparatus is in place (and usually generating cash flows), it's often a similar amount of effort to get it removed and restore the status quo. That's part of the "slipperiness" of the slope. The other part that may or may not be the case, is a tendency to expand the scope of a mandate. This is in part because the companies that derive cash flows will always want to increase them. It's also because the existence of the apparatus is attractive; it's an existing solution that can be coopted to new or expanded ends more easily than coming up with a new solution. And the ease is not just in implementation; it's also that the precedent is set so the opposition may be less powerful. In this case, I think the recent trend in school board elections and local library funding of banning minors (or everyone) from materials on sex education, sex positivity, LGBTQ stories or discourse, etc. suggests how any age verification program might find public pressure to increase in scope. Where it gets more dubious is the possibility of expanding the scope beyond minors (to identifying or simply banning everyone) or beyond materials of some (potentially alternative) sexual nature, i.e. to political, religious, foreign or technical subjects.
janalsncm 2y ago
In one paragraph the politicians claim it is about protecting children. Their supporting evidence is that 40% of college age women report being choked during sex. The implication is that by banning minors from watching porn it will protect college age women. There are so many issues with this reasoning. The most obvious is that the legislation wouldn’t ban college age men/women from watching porn. If this law is really about “protecting children” then why are they banning all porn and not just the particular violent videos they object to?
- tyre 2y ago
  I mean we ban children from smoking so they don’t stay addicted as adults and die from cancer years later.
  - 13of40 2y ago
    Over the last two decades we did a huge social experiment where porn availability went from occasional access to highly restricted printed material to every imaginable flavor being anonymously available 24/7 on a handheld device people carry with them every day. If it "causes cancer", so to speak, we should have unquestionable evidence at this point.
    - kulahan 2y ago
      What kind of evidence do you expect to see? I feel like I’ve read about a fair number of problems which this could be related to or even simply aggravate. There probably hasn’t been enough time for any studies to link a problem straight from widespread porn emergence all the way to damage in childrens’ development, though. Porn wasn’t, like, WIDELY available until maybe 20 years ago. We’ve basically had a single generation to study, and they’re not even done being kids yet for the most part. Still, the damage seems like an obvious outcome to me.
      - wkat4242 2y ago
        Everyone I knew in school copied porn images on diskettes downloaded from BBSes. That's a lot longer ago. We copied them like crazy lol. It's not a recent thing. And it wasn't soft stuff. I remember having pics of the aftermath of bukkake sessions etc. Yet I'm extremely respectful of women especially in bed.
ClassyJacket 2y ago
Are there any publicly trade VPNs I can buy shares in?
alephnerd 2y ago
As I've mentioned multiple times before on HN, this is because of Barroness Kidron's lobbying campaign [0] It's her recommendations that became the UK law and multiple state level laws. I'm actually kinda impressed, because she doesn't have a high net worth nor is she nobility (she was given the Barronness title for her directorial work in 2012). It goes to show that if you are organized and can hustle and network enough, you can make massive change. [0] - https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/14/british-baroness-online-safety-laws-00101854 https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/14/british-baroness-on...
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
  Fuck moral panicking pearl-clutchers who add no value except to enshittify the world with censorship, forced reproduction, and other forms of Big Mother control.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    Seems like a bit of an extreme reaction for porn (both Kidron's but also yours)
    - hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
      Are you a troll? The specific material is immaterial, the principle is far more important. But I guess you are fine with your rights or others being taken away.
- akira2501 2y ago
  The high net worth helps you push through things that are unpopular. The lack of it suggests there was existing and measurable popular social support for the idea.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    Anything can be popular with the right framing and messaging. You need to use the right mix of logos, ethos, and pathos. For example, you can frame opposition to this as an affront to privacy and overreach by government.
neilv 2y ago
> The bill would require that any data collection would ensure the user’s anonymity and would not be used to create a record of the user’s online activity. What are the penalties when this is violated (by pretty much every company involved)?
- bagels 2y ago
  How are they going to anonymously age verify? Ask a bunch of trivia questions, like asking the user to identify a floppy disk?
  - ndriscoll 2y ago
    There are plenty of ways to do it such that the verifier doesn't know why they are verifying and the relying party doesn't know who was verified. As far as I understand, the ISO 18013-5 mobile drivers license standard (which appear to be being implemented across a bunch of US states, including California[0]) seems to allow for each fact that appears on your license to be individually signed so that you could store your ID on your phone, and then when prompted, provide only your birthday or only an "over 18" marker that's signed by the state. The service provider could then not keep any records except to mark your user as a verified adult so in the future you can just login. [0] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/ca-dmv-wallet/ https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/ca-dmv-wallet/
vlovich123 2y ago
> During the filming, the British director cut two children from the documentary because she believed their experiences online had made them too vulnerable to include in the movie. Another videogame-obsessed participant was kicked out of college soon after she finished filming. A fourth was recommended for psychological support. So out of the 11 children she happened to follow, 4 ended up with pretty severe negative outcomes. And yet we’ve had nearly 17 years of smartphones and 20 years of Facebook, and I don’t believe I’ve read anywhere that ~40% of kids have such negative reactions to tech. Either she has enormous bad luck in selecting children for her documentary and selected mostly outliers, selected children who were more predisposed to having problems in the first place, or she is actually the one that has such a negative impact on kids lives. That’s not to say whether or not such things are bad ideas in the first place, but I wish policy was focused more on what the scientific literature says rather than what a filmmaker who followed some kids around is promoting.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
superkuh 2y ago
In order for a state to make KYC equitable for all people the legislation should lay out government infrastructure for providing the KYC verification. Having the private market do it is just a way to secretly disenfranchise huge segments of the population giving them no possible recourse for false positive rejections. This proposal's end results will be banks and other corporations doing the KYC and those types of corporations will mistakenly deny service to tens of thousands of people in order to prevent one actual real positive from making it through.
matrix87 2y ago
It's kind of ironic: this state government will freak the fuck out if access to porn is restricted in school libraries, but restricting it on the internet is somehow acceptable? Where is the consistency here? If we're going to restrict one, why not restrict the other? Or if we're not going to restrict one, how the fuck would restricting the other ever make sense? Or maybe they should make school libraries available to the public so I can go pick up some material from one the next time I need to do my business
hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
Please drink verification can. I'm sorry, but that is not a properly-formatted verification can. Please drink verification can. Please come back when you have money, are allowed to vote, and have parents who didn't lose your identity documents.

39 points by matrix87 2y ago

Same style of crap the Brits are trying. More invasive garbage to saddle end users with, rather than properly vet and regulate the industry.

wakawaka28 2y ago
The Brits are doing way worse things. There's no way to limit porn sites to adults without demanding intrusive information. Most people want privacy when looking at porn, for good reason, and that's incompatible with age limits. If you ask me, this is just a warmup to a broad attack on internet anonymity. Politicians want it to be literally impossible to be anonymous on the internet, so they can harrass their opposition.

VincentEvans 2y ago

North Carolina has the same law already in effect.

ranger_danger 2y ago
At least 8 states do, and more are actively trying.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

These laws are the ultimate in stupidity. Starting to feel conspiratorial that VPN companies are just bribing legislators to pass these laws. Makes much more sense to require sites to adhere to things like "Restricted to Adults" labeling, https://www.rtalabel.org/ https://www.rtalabel.org/, so that they can be appropriately blocked by parental filters.

throwaway115 2y ago

What's the steelman argument for this being a slippery slope? I can't think of one.

jmole 2y ago
I can't tell if you're asking for an argument against this proposal or for it.
RpFLCL 2y ago
I think there's an obvious slippery slope here, and it's visible in how these sorts of age verification requirements are implemented. Specifically, requiring a government ID to access, creating a log of who/what/where/when. The slippery slope comes from someone then asking the question: "Well, we already require an ID to allow someone to access porn... so can we require it for other things online where people have less desire for privacy? Why shouldn't we require an ID to post to social media, or participate in online video games (especially those violent ones!)" The slope I see, is once you set up a system for ID verification and require it for a primary thing people want to keep private, it becomes easier to mandate it in other areas where privacy is less demanded. Concern about that slope would be a nonissue if the laws mandated adult sites tag themselves as "adult content" for trivial filtering at the household network level, instead of establishing and normalizing the ID verification regime.
avidiax 2y ago
Mandates of any kind tend to have inertia: once the mandate is in place, the government/corporate apparatus is in place (and usually generating cash flows), it's often a similar amount of effort to get it removed and restore the status quo. That's part of the "slipperiness" of the slope. The other part that may or may not be the case, is a tendency to expand the scope of a mandate. This is in part because the companies that derive cash flows will always want to increase them. It's also because the existence of the apparatus is attractive; it's an existing solution that can be coopted to new or expanded ends more easily than coming up with a new solution. And the ease is not just in implementation; it's also that the precedent is set so the opposition may be less powerful. In this case, I think the recent trend in school board elections and local library funding of banning minors (or everyone) from materials on sex education, sex positivity, LGBTQ stories or discourse, etc. suggests how any age verification program might find public pressure to increase in scope. Where it gets more dubious is the possibility of expanding the scope beyond minors (to identifying or simply banning everyone) or beyond materials of some (potentially alternative) sexual nature, i.e. to political, religious, foreign or technical subjects.

janalsncm 2y ago

In one paragraph the politicians claim it is about protecting children. Their supporting evidence is that 40% of college age women report being choked during sex. The implication is that by banning minors from watching porn it will protect college age women. There are so many issues with this reasoning. The most obvious is that the legislation wouldn’t ban college age men/women from watching porn. If this law is really about “protecting children” then why are they banning all porn and not just the particular violent videos they object to?

tyre 2y ago
I mean we ban children from smoking so they don’t stay addicted as adults and die from cancer years later.
- 13of40 2y ago
  Over the last two decades we did a huge social experiment where porn availability went from occasional access to highly restricted printed material to every imaginable flavor being anonymously available 24/7 on a handheld device people carry with them every day. If it "causes cancer", so to speak, we should have unquestionable evidence at this point.
  - kulahan 2y ago
    What kind of evidence do you expect to see? I feel like I’ve read about a fair number of problems which this could be related to or even simply aggravate. There probably hasn’t been enough time for any studies to link a problem straight from widespread porn emergence all the way to damage in childrens’ development, though. Porn wasn’t, like, WIDELY available until maybe 20 years ago. We’ve basically had a single generation to study, and they’re not even done being kids yet for the most part. Still, the damage seems like an obvious outcome to me.
    - wkat4242 2y ago
      Everyone I knew in school copied porn images on diskettes downloaded from BBSes. That's a lot longer ago. We copied them like crazy lol. It's not a recent thing. And it wasn't soft stuff. I remember having pics of the aftermath of bukkake sessions etc. Yet I'm extremely respectful of women especially in bed.

ClassyJacket 2y ago

Are there any publicly trade VPNs I can buy shares in?

alephnerd 2y ago

As I've mentioned multiple times before on HN, this is because of Barroness Kidron's lobbying campaign [0] It's her recommendations that became the UK law and multiple state level laws. I'm actually kinda impressed, because she doesn't have a high net worth nor is she nobility (she was given the Barronness title for her directorial work in 2012). It goes to show that if you are organized and can hustle and network enough, you can make massive change. [0] - https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/14/british-baroness-online-safety-laws-00101854 https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/14/british-baroness-on...

hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
Fuck moral panicking pearl-clutchers who add no value except to enshittify the world with censorship, forced reproduction, and other forms of Big Mother control.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  Seems like a bit of an extreme reaction for porn (both Kidron's but also yours)
  - hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
    Are you a troll? The specific material is immaterial, the principle is far more important. But I guess you are fine with your rights or others being taken away.
akira2501 2y ago
The high net worth helps you push through things that are unpopular. The lack of it suggests there was existing and measurable popular social support for the idea.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  Anything can be popular with the right framing and messaging. You need to use the right mix of logos, ethos, and pathos. For example, you can frame opposition to this as an affront to privacy and overreach by government.

neilv 2y ago

> The bill would require that any data collection would ensure the user’s anonymity and would not be used to create a record of the user’s online activity. What are the penalties when this is violated (by pretty much every company involved)?

bagels 2y ago
How are they going to anonymously age verify? Ask a bunch of trivia questions, like asking the user to identify a floppy disk?
- ndriscoll 2y ago
  There are plenty of ways to do it such that the verifier doesn't know why they are verifying and the relying party doesn't know who was verified. As far as I understand, the ISO 18013-5 mobile drivers license standard (which appear to be being implemented across a bunch of US states, including California[0]) seems to allow for each fact that appears on your license to be individually signed so that you could store your ID on your phone, and then when prompted, provide only your birthday or only an "over 18" marker that's signed by the state. The service provider could then not keep any records except to mark your user as a verified adult so in the future you can just login. [0] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/ca-dmv-wallet/ https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/ca-dmv-wallet/

vlovich123 2y ago

> During the filming, the British director cut two children from the documentary because she believed their experiences online had made them too vulnerable to include in the movie. Another videogame-obsessed participant was kicked out of college soon after she finished filming. A fourth was recommended for psychological support. So out of the 11 children she happened to follow, 4 ended up with pretty severe negative outcomes. And yet we’ve had nearly 17 years of smartphones and 20 years of Facebook, and I don’t believe I’ve read anywhere that ~40% of kids have such negative reactions to tech. Either she has enormous bad luck in selecting children for her documentary and selected mostly outliers, selected children who were more predisposed to having problems in the first place, or she is actually the one that has such a negative impact on kids lives. That’s not to say whether or not such things are bad ideas in the first place, but I wish policy was focused more on what the scientific literature says rather than what a filmmaker who followed some kids around is promoting.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

superkuh 2y ago

In order for a state to make KYC equitable for all people the legislation should lay out government infrastructure for providing the KYC verification. Having the private market do it is just a way to secretly disenfranchise huge segments of the population giving them no possible recourse for false positive rejections. This proposal's end results will be banks and other corporations doing the KYC and those types of corporations will mistakenly deny service to tens of thousands of people in order to prevent one actual real positive from making it through.

matrix87 2y ago

It's kind of ironic: this state government will freak the fuck out if access to porn is restricted in school libraries, but restricting it on the internet is somehow acceptable? Where is the consistency here? If we're going to restrict one, why not restrict the other? Or if we're not going to restrict one, how the fuck would restricting the other ever make sense? Or maybe they should make school libraries available to the public so I can go pick up some material from one the next time I need to do my business

hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago

Please drink verification can. I'm sorry, but that is not a properly-formatted verification can. Please drink verification can. Please come back when you have money, are allowed to vote, and have parents who didn't lose your identity documents.