17 ms·

Age verification doesn’t work

134 points by rudy6912 1y ago

lofaszvanitt 1y ago
Just one more step to tell people: you watch porn, you should go and have coitus with someone in real life. You want someone assigned to you?
lambdaone 1y ago
Age verification at the content end has always been a silly idea. Eyeball networks can, and do, implement such filtering already - for example, UK mobile networks block porn by default, but allow any adult account holder to connect to unfiltered service. Providing a BGP feed of such provider network subnets to content providers would then allow them to happily serve content to those subnets without any further checks, safe in the knowledge that they will only be providing service to endpoints controlled by adults. Details of how this can be done for other services including home broadband omitted - suffice it to say your router would have both adult and child-friendly SSIDs. This seems both simple and obvious, and protects children without encumbering adults, risking privacy, or forcing a mass censorship regime on everyone.
natas 1y ago
Shouldn't parents decide what's good for their kids instead of having their government do that?
amradio1989 1y ago
An adult content provider is legally bound to not distribute to minors. Its not even debatable. Your local adult video store can't sell to minors. They have to check id. If they don't, and a minor buys some goods, the store is liable. Your local strip club can't let minors into their doors. They have to check id. If they don't, and a minor gains entry, the club is liable. The same applies to all age-restricted products everywhere, online or offline. I can't buy liquor on doordash without showing ID for crying out loud. But for some (probably nefarious) reason, online adult content providers want to pretend the rule doesn't apply to them. Device-level controls? Hilarious. What... are we going to add device-controls to a teenager's car to prevent them from driving to liquor stores too? Don't get me wrong, there's some shady stuff behind AV. But I strongly disagree with the notion that an adult content provider isn't responsible for restricting their content in a way that works.
- jheriko 1y ago
  [dead]
- rpdillon 1y ago
  The purpose of these laws is not to protect children. > "We came up with an idea on pornography to make it so that the porn companies bear the liability for the underage use, as opposed to the person who visits the website [having to] certify that 'I am 18," Vought told the undercover Centre for Climate Reporting staffers. "We've got a number of states that are passing this and then you know what happens is the porn company says 'We're not going to do business in your state'—which, of course, is entirely what we were after."
jheriko 1y ago
[dead]
metalman 1y ago
Age verification is only one, of a growing list of fuckeries that does/can not work, at scale, without huge unknown fundamental changes to societal norms and practices. Thinking through to the end games of implimenting any of these new types of oversight leads to grim scenarios and outcomes for indivuals. Governments beurocracies are panting in antisipation of new powers and the many ways to exploit the nessesary (now) new contracts to be issued to new companies that will be "needed" to perform these (new) tasks that are outside of the governments expertise. Not just tax, not just fuckery, but privitisation of taxation and fuckery in.a way that gives a private entity all kinds of rights, and burdens people with new responsibilties. This pattern of seperating rights and responsibilities is the hallmark of the whole public private partnerships that results from the weaponisation of "saftey" The other thing that is standard is to ensure that there are no performance targets or reviews ever allowed to be included in any of these "saftey" initiatives, along with a complete elimination of marking the baseline conditions, so that future reviews, are impossible. The other two parallel things happening are moves to refuse cash/debit payments and push services including government, totaly online, for which there can be no legaly implimentable end game, that does not include providing free internet, devices, and training(in home), with all of the updating and maintenance, as there is no end run around the things that are legaly public accessable in a democracy, like documents.
JackSlateur 1y ago
Can anyone be kind enough to explain how this "age verification" works ? Surely, if this is about "show me an ID", one can grab his parent's If this is about "show me your face", again this seems stupid at best (how one can detect that this is an adult face, especially between 17 yo vs 19 yo) So .. how does it work ? And also, does it work ? :)
cande 1y ago
[dead]
atoav 1y ago
The thing about age verification ia that it is at its core identity verification. You need to make sure the person on the other side of the screen is indeed who they are. This means it isn't enough to verify the age of an account once. If all you need are verified accounts you just created a black market for verfied accounts. That means you need to verify the identity of the actual person sitting in front of the screen with regularity. And that is problematic in various ways.
UrMomsRobotLovr 1y ago
This age verification stuff is really poorly designed by law makers. That said, the article points out the number of free VPN services with ad blockers are a problem. Couldn’t they run their own free VPN services that enables access and keeps the ads? Seems like porn VPN would be popular.
- decimalenough 1y ago
  No, because law-abiding companies can't offer tools to circumvent the law. As the article says, all this means is that law-abiding porn sites (that, for example, respond to requests to delete CSAM and revenge porn) will go bankrupt and everybody will be driven to sketchypron.xxx instead.
  - IAmBroom 1y ago
    So radar detectors for cars don't exist?
    - decimalenough 1y ago
      They're not sold by car companies, and they're illegal in many countries.
  - delusional 1y ago
    > law-abiding porn sites will go bankrupt How would that work? Can PornHub not exist without the "lucrative" market of children watching porn?
    - Meneth 1y ago
      More like, they can't exist without the lucrative market of the 90% of current customers who will refuse age verification and go elsewhere.
      - delusional 1y ago
        Do you seriously believe that 90% of current porn consumers would rather watch their pornography on websites where it's intermingled with child pornography and revenge porn, than verify their age? Are you seriously arguing that 90% of porn viewers are against digital age verification, even though about 60% of the population (in my home country) approve of the use for purchasing physical goods? In your reading of the world, there can only ever exist a deregulated market, and democracy may as well pack its bags and make room for anarchy. I don't think that's a reasonable worldview.
decimalenough 1y ago
Australia is about to introduce the dumpster fire of age verification for all social media, not just porn. Or at least the law says so, nobody appears to have the faintest idea of how this will be implemented or what "social media" even means.
ngruhn 1y ago
Google can probably infer what I had for breakfast from the way I move the cursor. Can't we have ID-less age verification somehow? Sure, it won't be 100% accurate but keeping out 90% of the kids is a win.
- danaris 1y ago
  We do. It has a terrible false positive and false negative rate. So it's not just a matter of it "keeping out 90% of the kids"; it's a matter of it decreeing that due to unknowable factors, and with no ability to appeal to a human, you are 13, and are no longer allowed to access large chunks of the internet.
- octo888 1y ago
  No, let's not encourage Google and the rest of the ad industry
- modernerd 1y ago
  Google launched ID-less age approximation in July in the US: https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/age-assurance-measures-safer-online-kids-teens-us/ https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/age-assurance...
  - UncleMeat 1y ago
    And kids rapidly realized that watching a few videos on taxes would bump them into the adult category.
  - ngruhn 1y ago
    Amazing, that's exactly what I had in mind.
  - jolmg 1y ago
    > Age verification: If we incorrectly estimate a user to be under 18, the user has the option to correct their age, including by uploading a photo of their government ID or a selfie. Hopefully false positives won't be set high and this abused as an excuse to obtain sensitive personal information on their users.
nomilk 1y ago
The choice citizens have now is between an 'internet licence' (submit ID's to myriad sites), or an 'internet tax' (VPN). Super annoying! Given Australia doesn't even require Age Verification on porn sites (only on social media sites), the incentives hint this was strongly supported by legacy media (90% of Aussie media is owned by two companies, Newscorp and Nine Entertainment). The internet licence will make it difficult for both authors and readers on alternative media platforms. And it will outright prohibit young people from getting information from non-permitted sources (of course, legacy sources are not affected - incidentally, they're probably more harmful than the prohibited sources). (I've long said, to try to think clearly after watching 'the news' is akin to trying to operate heavy machinery after consuming alcohol).
- verisimi 1y ago
  > And it will outright prohibit young people from getting information from non-permitted sources (of course, legacy sources are not affected - incidentally, they're probably more harmful than the prohibited sources). Verification is the stick, AI is the carrot. More than one answer is a bug - Eric Schmidt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeIIpLqsOe4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeIIpLqsOe4
- Aeolun 1y ago
  > The internet licence will make it difficult for both authors and readers on alternative media platforms Not really? Like the article says, they’ll just go to sites that don’t require age verification.
  - DrillShopper 1y ago
    Once again showing that the best way to make money in that market is to just break the law.
  - nomilk 1y ago
    Hard to argue that isn't an inconvenience. In other words, the outcome is the same, but thanks to government intervention, everyone's worse off. A good example of where social media can really matter is for say, gay kids in a religious households, where they might not be able to talk to someone in person. Social media makes it easy to create a dummy account and visit forums for advice or reassurance.
high_byte 1y ago
welcome to the Age of Scam Verification the internet is no longer anonymous
ckbkr10 1y ago
I wish there was a honest discussion, I am with them about parents not giving a shit and pushing away responsibility. The idea of supervision in education institutions is good as well. The kids in my family were well protected and supervised, they got into contact with hardcore porn at the age of 6 when other kids had access to smartphones and exposed them to it. I would like to see a honest discussion about the impact of porn on kids, I cannot really imagine that it doesn't distort the view and expectations on sex. In my 20s I was promiscious and lived what I saw in pornography, only later in life I learned about normal sex. In germany we had a state sponsored porn flick once produced by ZDF Neo, maybe that is the approach to expose the kids to material that shows sex as a respectable flow rather than an extreme fantasy.
- _mu 1y ago
  What is really missing is good sex education in schools, especially public schools - and in particular in the United States. The state of sex education in America actually deserves the work deplorable, it's so bad. Looking at this comment thread, I get the sense that people are coming from vastly different backgrounds and upbringings. There's no baseline established for what people are trying to discuss. There are a lot of topics that should simply be explained to children up front from a very early age. When a topic is not shrouded in mystery, it becomes boring. So kids should learn from an early age what is sex, puberty, menstruation, homosexuality, etc. and it should be presented in a manner-of-fact way that takes the emotional charge out of the picture. When people are educated, they have more latitude to make good decisions.
- Aeolun 1y ago
  > I would like to see a honest discussion about the impact of porn on kids, I cannot really imagine that it doesn't distort the view and expectations on sex. Only if they have no other exposure to this pretty damn normal thing. If all the adults in their life refuse to talk about because of some misplaced idea it is shameful, where are they going to get that info? Not saying that’s the case for you, just that it’s the impression I get from many people.
- Retric 1y ago
  > I would like to see a honest discussion about the impact of porn on kids, I cannot really imagine that it doesn't distort the view and expectations on sex. There’s a bunch of studies on this and at the individual level it seems to do a bunch of stuff, but at the population level it has at most an effect so small it can’t be measured. Which IMO suggests causation goes in the other direction. IE if you’re entering puberty early you may seek both porn and sex at a younger age. That said, I’m not an expert and have only briefly looked through the literature.
staticelf 1y ago
Modern politicians only goal seems to be how to make peoples lives worse. I don't understand how this did happen. I think the people simply got too lazy and let them run loose instead of resisting like we used to. Now the EU is slowly turning into a oligarchy where very few control the majority. For every stupid law they make, the more I wish for it's destruction.
- arcane23 1y ago
  Lately there has been a larger power difference between governing and governed, and it shows itself in these kinds of moves.
chmod775 1y ago
While I'll immediately believe their complaints about political shenanigans and publicity stunts going on in the EU commission, this post very obviously intentionally ignores good-faith efforts at building out privacy-preserving age verification using ZKP. They're laying into a strawman - with gusto - when they attack age verification methods that are objectively worse than the commission's best proposal. It's hurting their own case by giving the EU commission the easiest retort imaginable. If you really don't want age verification, that's bad, because they usually get the last word in. Better to respond in good faith to the commission's strongest possible argument, rather than do this, which is going to get brushed aside while handing them a win.
- LelouBil 1y ago
  I found out about this for zero knowledge profs that are able to be separated from the issued document. https://github.com/microsoft/crescent-credentials https://github.com/microsoft/crescent-credentials The demo I saw looked really interesting but I don't have the knowledge to say if the approach is viable or not
- rpdillon 1y ago
  The laws are all being passed and ZKP is nothing more than a proof of concept. The laws are not being passed in good faith, and so I think it's a mistake to think that ZKP will ever be used. The only two systems I've heard of that have actually been deployed to comply with these laws are either face scanning or ID scanning. Neither one is acceptable, but the legislation is passing anyway.
- g-b-r 1y ago
  Privacy-preserving good-faith efforts requiring a Google/Apple account and a phone passing Play Integrity (or an iPhone)
  - mindslight 1y ago
    They might be "good faith" in terms of the relationship between corpos and government, but they most certainly are not good faith in the relationship between corpos and individual software freedom. One can't simply sprinkle ZKP faerie dust and obtain any desired security properties. These systems simply cannot provide the claimed security properties without relying on treacherous computing that prevents individuals from running the software of their choosing on their own devices.
nine_k 1y ago
How about the scam of lawmaking disconnected from reality :( Introducing laws that are going to be relatively trivially circumvented, which do not provide the protection they purport to provide, and which burden citizens with rather useless but onerous duties, should be called out as a failure at lawmaking. I think the best defense against such laws is to show thoroughly why and how bad and useless such laws are, so that large enough political constituencies (that is, us, citizens) would become interested in fixing or repealing them, and would vote accordingly.
freddie_mercury 1y ago
So the argument is that, even though age verification is required for this line of business in the real world, online it shouldn't be required because their ad-supported model won't be profitable?
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
  They argue it won’t work and will hurt people more than it helps.
  - lp0_on_fire 1y ago
    Bars and Casinos argued the exact same thing when we mandated they check the IDs of a patron before serving them a drink. The world didn't stop spinning.
    - BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
      But the law applied to almost all bars because it’s more enforceable. I don’t mean to white knight for the porn company but I think it’s a good point.
      - amradio1989 1y ago
        It's not really a good point. Yes it's more difficult, but that doesn't exempt them from complying. And they've made basically zero effort to comply. You could argue quite convincingly that the explosion of adult content sites is due largely to evading regulation and reaching a wider (ie: illegal) audience.
        BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
        What are you talking about though? I don’t care one way or another whether the porn company makes money, fuck em. The problem is if your law doesn’t prevent kids from watching porn but instead pushes them to shadier sites.
        1y ago
txrx0000 1y ago
It's much easier to implement user-configurable client-side filters at the application and OS level than censor the entire Internet. But of course that's not what it's about. Online age verification and content moderation was never about protecting anyone. It's about controlling the masses and tricking them into believing that it's for their own good.
- crowbahr 1y ago
  ID will be a new form of auth. ISO-18013-7 establishes the equivalent of OAuth for electronic ID presentation on the Internet. It's already accepted. Apple and Google announcing the ability to use your ID at TSA is ISO-18013-5 and it's a short hop to 18013-7 from there. We will be barred from accessing sites without valid ID. The question is can we get a few IdPs to provide the ID in a privacy sensitive way (the relying party really only needs to know your age after all). Ideally an international governing body, under the auspices of the UN, holds the IDs and transmits the specific claims when requested and keeps no logs on requests. Realistically it will be Apple and Google and you'll just have to trust them to totally not use the data of what sites request your ID to track you (lmao. lol, even.)
- edu 1y ago
  I agree that client-side filters would be a great solution, but I see two issues there: 1) Not everybody would know how to do it 2) This creates a weakest link problem, where in a class of say 15 kids, just having one with a non-blocked device would allow for all to see. I don't know what would be good solution, maybe something intermediate... for example, filtering at the ISP level and making it mandatory for them to inform and request the settings for all their customers? Just a form, so they can block it. But then, maybe I want to block porn for my underage kids but not for me or my partner.
  - txrx0000 1y ago
    1) It's up to the parents to decide whether they want to put in the effort to look up how to use the parental control settings for their own child. 2) It's up to the child to decide who they want to associate with in school and in society, and up to the parents to advise their child in their decision-making. Presumably, the parents are the ones buying the child's device, so this can be done at the OS level. The parent creates a user account for the child and a password-protected admin account for themselves on the new device, and only allow the firewall settings to be changed by the admin account. We can even implement offline on-device neural network-based detection and filtering, and you decide what to filter. If the child is old enough to work and buy their own device, then it's debatable whether they should be moderated at all. The problem with filtering at beyond the device level is widespread censorship, surveillance, and the erosion of the freedoms of the common man. The systems being built for supposedly the safety of the children are much too powerful that I can't help but question their true purpose.
cpa 1y ago
I got the French version and was really confused, since it randomly mentioned autonomous vehicles on the page. Turns out, Age Verification = AV = Autonomous Vehicle. That's why you do quality control on AI-generated content :^)
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
blitzar 1y ago
The biggest impact I have experienced so far has been that popups for cam sites, porn sites and other such affiliate marketting referal attempts lead to an age verification page rather than directly to all the "hot singles in my area looking for sex". I don't like it, but for the most part the internet is now a better place for me to browse.
- johtso 1y ago
  Do you not use an adblocker? I can't remember the last time I saw that kind of ad..
  - blitzar 1y ago
    DNS level and in browser ad blocking. Still not enough to overcome some of the more agressive parts of the internet.
littlecranky67 1y ago
The article is a bit one-sided (yes, they have an agenda): > But that comparison is dishonest: on a gambling or merchant site, users already expect to submit personal data — credit card info, name, phone number, address. They are paying for something. On a free site, users do not expect to hand over private data. They simply refuse — and move on to other sites. Why wouldn’t they? the success of OnlyFans destroys this argument. It is not that people do not pay for porn - the authors try to uphold their free, ad-based model. But looking at OnlyFans, people absolutely seem to be OK submitting their personal data incl. payment details.
- g-b-r 1y ago
  Some people
29athrowaway 1y ago
Age verification will make porn websites go out of business. And this is likely what the legislators truly wanted. Porn is partially protected by the constitution and it is politically impopular to tell people what they can't do.
- lofaszvanitt 1y ago
  Of course it won't. Maybe it will some of the current players. But I think they already have a lot of sites that use the same infra, just with different skins...
- scarface_74 1y ago
  The state I live in already has age verification. Any site that is not based in the US - including the most popular one - just ignores it. The other sites can be accessed via a VPN.
- rpdillon 1y ago
  Vought confirmed as much. > "We came up with an idea on pornography to make it so that the porn companies bear the liability for the underage use, as opposed to the person who visits the website [having to] certify that 'I am 18," Vought told the undercover Centre for Climate Reporting staffers. "We've got a number of states that are passing this and then you know what happens is the porn company says 'We're not going to do business in your state'—which, of course, is entirely what we were after." https://reason.com/2024/08/19/age-check-laws-are-a-back-door-to-banning-porn-project-2025-architect-says-in-hidden-camera-video/ https://reason.com/2024/08/19/age-check-laws-are-a-back-door...
precommunicator 1y ago
Most important part: > Device-level parental controls have existed for years, and can actually block a million sites. But politicians can’t take credit for them.
prmoustache 1y ago
It is not like kids/teenager who currently visit the big porn sites like pornhub will say: "Oh I can't, let's read a book instead" They'll just get it somewhere else, private chatrooms, torrents, etc and from probably even less regulated and more nefarious sources that also serve stuff super hardcore or completely illegal.
- edu 1y ago
  But it will be harder for them, the same way it's harder to get alcohol if you don't have a proper ID, and just that will prevent a good number of them of accessing it or at least accessing it in a regular way.
  - triceratops 1y ago
    Why aren't there proposals for online age verification to be exactly like alcohol and tobacco? You can show ID at a real world store and buy an age verification token. The token is good for exactly one user account on one website for one year. The website is responsible for ensuring no account sharing. No need to store IDs online and it's still pretty hard for kids to access anything we don't want them to. Just like alcohol and tobacco there will be straw purchasers who re-sell to minors, and we accept that imperfection. We also punish people who re-sell or give alcohol to minors.
    - dragonwriter 1y ago
      > Why aren't there proposals for online age verification to be exactly like alcohol and tobacco? > You can show ID at a real world store and buy an age verification token. The token is good for exactly one user account on one website for one year I don’t know if you’ve ever bought alcohol or tobacco, either in person or online, but the process in either case, in my experience, does not involve showing government ID at a private business separate from the one you are going to purchase the product from in advance to purchase a single-account, single-year token which you then use to prove age when you purchase the good in question.
      - 1y ago
freestingo 1y ago
A completely absurd and clearly biased article trying to defend the impossible. Age verification is somehow supposed to be bad for online porn content providers (even though it is already mandatory for real-world porn content providers, for obvious reasons) because... it would hurt their profits and is not 100% effective. Child labour laws also severely hurt company profits and are not 100% effective; so much so that companies choose to delocalize production plants in the opposite part of the world, just to be able to continue exploiting workers. I guess child labour laws are bad too, and must be stopped. My favourite and most out-of-touch part of the article was the one in which they argue it is "a fallacy" to think pornography can be harmful to teenagers because "research into pornography’s impact on children is limited and inconclusive — prompting calls for further study". I actually laughed out loud at this part
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
  I definitely don’t wanna take it with more than a grain of salt, but they raise good points I think. For example, the idea it’s only enforced on big players so people will just go to shadier sites sounds like an issue IF it’s true. So it sounds more like it would be like 10% effective at keeping kids off porn.
- IshKebab 1y ago
  Why did you laugh out loud? It's clear that it doesn't have large impacts on children - otherwise no research would be needed to know this, in the same way we don't really need research to know that over-use of alcohol fuels violence. If there's a small effect then we do need research to show it and that's extremely difficult to do and as far as I know nobody has. Same deal as violent video games. What's your view on those?
- classified 1y ago
  Could you please point us to credible sources about how online porn is supposed to be harmful to teenagers, beyond “If they knew I'm watching this, they'd laugh at me”? As for the bad article, it's AI-generated slop.
  - 1y ago
pcthrowaway 1y ago
While I agree that there's something dystopian about government-mandated age verification on the web, it's amusing to say the least to see porn companies entering discourse on ethics, since the commodification of sexual services under capitalism is already a tough sell to people who are particularly interested in social justice.
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
  Yeah they’re shit too.
jolmg 1y ago
> usually, us and Pornhub Who's "us"? This blog doesn't seem to have an About Us.
- jeanloolz 1y ago
  Did not know neither and reseatched. Us = xvideos.com the 2nd largest porn site.
- classified 1y ago
  An AI slop generator isn't strictly part of any "Us".
littlecranky67 1y ago
Love how the articles tiptoes around "Porn users don't want to be identified", yet later in the article they disclose that their current tracking method is able to uniquely identify users and their behaviour.
prmoustache 1y ago
Porn will never disappear the same way prostitution will never disappear. It exists even in countries were people can be faced with death sentences. Instead of age verification, I'd rather see a discussion on how to make a form of ethical porn more visible and popular than the one which involves sex trafficking, sexism and violent or degrading practices. I'd rather see good porn more accessible to teenager than letting them use workarounds and visit terrible stuff.

134 points by rudy6912 1y ago

Just one more step to tell people: you watch porn, you should go and have coitus with someone in real life. You want someone assigned to you?

lambdaone 1y ago

Age verification at the content end has always been a silly idea. Eyeball networks can, and do, implement such filtering already - for example, UK mobile networks block porn by default, but allow any adult account holder to connect to unfiltered service. Providing a BGP feed of such provider network subnets to content providers would then allow them to happily serve content to those subnets without any further checks, safe in the knowledge that they will only be providing service to endpoints controlled by adults. Details of how this can be done for other services including home broadband omitted - suffice it to say your router would have both adult and child-friendly SSIDs. This seems both simple and obvious, and protects children without encumbering adults, risking privacy, or forcing a mass censorship regime on everyone.

natas 1y ago

Shouldn't parents decide what's good for their kids instead of having their government do that?

amradio1989 1y ago

An adult content provider is legally bound to not distribute to minors. Its not even debatable. Your local adult video store can't sell to minors. They have to check id. If they don't, and a minor buys some goods, the store is liable. Your local strip club can't let minors into their doors. They have to check id. If they don't, and a minor gains entry, the club is liable. The same applies to all age-restricted products everywhere, online or offline. I can't buy liquor on doordash without showing ID for crying out loud. But for some (probably nefarious) reason, online adult content providers want to pretend the rule doesn't apply to them. Device-level controls? Hilarious. What... are we going to add device-controls to a teenager's car to prevent them from driving to liquor stores too? Don't get me wrong, there's some shady stuff behind AV. But I strongly disagree with the notion that an adult content provider isn't responsible for restricting their content in a way that works.

jheriko 1y ago
[dead]
rpdillon 1y ago
The purpose of these laws is not to protect children. > "We came up with an idea on pornography to make it so that the porn companies bear the liability for the underage use, as opposed to the person who visits the website [having to] certify that 'I am 18," Vought told the undercover Centre for Climate Reporting staffers. "We've got a number of states that are passing this and then you know what happens is the porn company says 'We're not going to do business in your state'—which, of course, is entirely what we were after."

jheriko 1y ago

[dead]

metalman 1y ago

Age verification is only one, of a growing list of fuckeries that does/can not work, at scale, without huge unknown fundamental changes to societal norms and practices. Thinking through to the end games of implimenting any of these new types of oversight leads to grim scenarios and outcomes for indivuals. Governments beurocracies are panting in antisipation of new powers and the many ways to exploit the nessesary (now) new contracts to be issued to new companies that will be "needed" to perform these (new) tasks that are outside of the governments expertise. Not just tax, not just fuckery, but privitisation of taxation and fuckery in.a way that gives a private entity all kinds of rights, and burdens people with new responsibilties. This pattern of seperating rights and responsibilities is the hallmark of the whole public private partnerships that results from the weaponisation of "saftey" The other thing that is standard is to ensure that there are no performance targets or reviews ever allowed to be included in any of these "saftey" initiatives, along with a complete elimination of marking the baseline conditions, so that future reviews, are impossible. The other two parallel things happening are moves to refuse cash/debit payments and push services including government, totaly online, for which there can be no legaly implimentable end game, that does not include providing free internet, devices, and training(in home), with all of the updating and maintenance, as there is no end run around the things that are legaly public accessable in a democracy, like documents.

JackSlateur 1y ago

Can anyone be kind enough to explain how this "age verification" works ? Surely, if this is about "show me an ID", one can grab his parent's If this is about "show me your face", again this seems stupid at best (how one can detect that this is an adult face, especially between 17 yo vs 19 yo) So .. how does it work ? And also, does it work ? :)

cande 1y ago

[dead]

atoav 1y ago

The thing about age verification ia that it is at its core identity verification. You need to make sure the person on the other side of the screen is indeed who they are. This means it isn't enough to verify the age of an account once. If all you need are verified accounts you just created a black market for verfied accounts. That means you need to verify the identity of the actual person sitting in front of the screen with regularity. And that is problematic in various ways.

UrMomsRobotLovr 1y ago

This age verification stuff is really poorly designed by law makers. That said, the article points out the number of free VPN services with ad blockers are a problem. Couldn’t they run their own free VPN services that enables access and keeps the ads? Seems like porn VPN would be popular.

decimalenough 1y ago
No, because law-abiding companies can't offer tools to circumvent the law. As the article says, all this means is that law-abiding porn sites (that, for example, respond to requests to delete CSAM and revenge porn) will go bankrupt and everybody will be driven to sketchypron.xxx instead.
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  So radar detectors for cars don't exist?
  - decimalenough 1y ago
    They're not sold by car companies, and they're illegal in many countries.
- delusional 1y ago
  > law-abiding porn sites will go bankrupt How would that work? Can PornHub not exist without the "lucrative" market of children watching porn?
  - Meneth 1y ago
    More like, they can't exist without the lucrative market of the 90% of current customers who will refuse age verification and go elsewhere.
    - delusional 1y ago
      Do you seriously believe that 90% of current porn consumers would rather watch their pornography on websites where it's intermingled with child pornography and revenge porn, than verify their age? Are you seriously arguing that 90% of porn viewers are against digital age verification, even though about 60% of the population (in my home country) approve of the use for purchasing physical goods? In your reading of the world, there can only ever exist a deregulated market, and democracy may as well pack its bags and make room for anarchy. I don't think that's a reasonable worldview.

decimalenough 1y ago

Australia is about to introduce the dumpster fire of age verification for all social media, not just porn. Or at least the law says so, nobody appears to have the faintest idea of how this will be implemented or what "social media" even means.

ngruhn 1y ago

Google can probably infer what I had for breakfast from the way I move the cursor. Can't we have ID-less age verification somehow? Sure, it won't be 100% accurate but keeping out 90% of the kids is a win.

danaris 1y ago
We do. It has a terrible false positive and false negative rate. So it's not just a matter of it "keeping out 90% of the kids"; it's a matter of it decreeing that due to unknowable factors, and with no ability to appeal to a human, you are 13, and are no longer allowed to access large chunks of the internet.
octo888 1y ago
No, let's not encourage Google and the rest of the ad industry
modernerd 1y ago
Google launched ID-less age approximation in July in the US: https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/age-assurance-measures-safer-online-kids-teens-us/ https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/age-assurance...
- UncleMeat 1y ago
  And kids rapidly realized that watching a few videos on taxes would bump them into the adult category.
- ngruhn 1y ago
  Amazing, that's exactly what I had in mind.
- jolmg 1y ago
  > Age verification: If we incorrectly estimate a user to be under 18, the user has the option to correct their age, including by uploading a photo of their government ID or a selfie. Hopefully false positives won't be set high and this abused as an excuse to obtain sensitive personal information on their users.

nomilk 1y ago

The choice citizens have now is between an 'internet licence' (submit ID's to myriad sites), or an 'internet tax' (VPN). Super annoying! Given Australia doesn't even require Age Verification on porn sites (only on social media sites), the incentives hint this was strongly supported by legacy media (90% of Aussie media is owned by two companies, Newscorp and Nine Entertainment). The internet licence will make it difficult for both authors and readers on alternative media platforms. And it will outright prohibit young people from getting information from non-permitted sources (of course, legacy sources are not affected - incidentally, they're probably more harmful than the prohibited sources). (I've long said, to try to think clearly after watching 'the news' is akin to trying to operate heavy machinery after consuming alcohol).

verisimi 1y ago
> And it will outright prohibit young people from getting information from non-permitted sources (of course, legacy sources are not affected - incidentally, they're probably more harmful than the prohibited sources). Verification is the stick, AI is the carrot. More than one answer is a bug - Eric Schmidt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeIIpLqsOe4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeIIpLqsOe4
Aeolun 1y ago
> The internet licence will make it difficult for both authors and readers on alternative media platforms Not really? Like the article says, they’ll just go to sites that don’t require age verification.
- DrillShopper 1y ago
  Once again showing that the best way to make money in that market is to just break the law.
- nomilk 1y ago
  Hard to argue that isn't an inconvenience. In other words, the outcome is the same, but thanks to government intervention, everyone's worse off. A good example of where social media can really matter is for say, gay kids in a religious households, where they might not be able to talk to someone in person. Social media makes it easy to create a dummy account and visit forums for advice or reassurance.

high_byte 1y ago

welcome to the Age of Scam Verification the internet is no longer anonymous

ckbkr10 1y ago

I wish there was a honest discussion, I am with them about parents not giving a shit and pushing away responsibility. The idea of supervision in education institutions is good as well. The kids in my family were well protected and supervised, they got into contact with hardcore porn at the age of 6 when other kids had access to smartphones and exposed them to it. I would like to see a honest discussion about the impact of porn on kids, I cannot really imagine that it doesn't distort the view and expectations on sex. In my 20s I was promiscious and lived what I saw in pornography, only later in life I learned about normal sex. In germany we had a state sponsored porn flick once produced by ZDF Neo, maybe that is the approach to expose the kids to material that shows sex as a respectable flow rather than an extreme fantasy.

_mu 1y ago
What is really missing is good sex education in schools, especially public schools - and in particular in the United States. The state of sex education in America actually deserves the work deplorable, it's so bad. Looking at this comment thread, I get the sense that people are coming from vastly different backgrounds and upbringings. There's no baseline established for what people are trying to discuss. There are a lot of topics that should simply be explained to children up front from a very early age. When a topic is not shrouded in mystery, it becomes boring. So kids should learn from an early age what is sex, puberty, menstruation, homosexuality, etc. and it should be presented in a manner-of-fact way that takes the emotional charge out of the picture. When people are educated, they have more latitude to make good decisions.
Aeolun 1y ago
> I would like to see a honest discussion about the impact of porn on kids, I cannot really imagine that it doesn't distort the view and expectations on sex. Only if they have no other exposure to this pretty damn normal thing. If all the adults in their life refuse to talk about because of some misplaced idea it is shameful, where are they going to get that info? Not saying that’s the case for you, just that it’s the impression I get from many people.
Retric 1y ago
> I would like to see a honest discussion about the impact of porn on kids, I cannot really imagine that it doesn't distort the view and expectations on sex. There’s a bunch of studies on this and at the individual level it seems to do a bunch of stuff, but at the population level it has at most an effect so small it can’t be measured. Which IMO suggests causation goes in the other direction. IE if you’re entering puberty early you may seek both porn and sex at a younger age. That said, I’m not an expert and have only briefly looked through the literature.

staticelf 1y ago

Modern politicians only goal seems to be how to make peoples lives worse. I don't understand how this did happen. I think the people simply got too lazy and let them run loose instead of resisting like we used to. Now the EU is slowly turning into a oligarchy where very few control the majority. For every stupid law they make, the more I wish for it's destruction.

arcane23 1y ago
Lately there has been a larger power difference between governing and governed, and it shows itself in these kinds of moves.

chmod775 1y ago

While I'll immediately believe their complaints about political shenanigans and publicity stunts going on in the EU commission, this post very obviously intentionally ignores good-faith efforts at building out privacy-preserving age verification using ZKP. They're laying into a strawman - with gusto - when they attack age verification methods that are objectively worse than the commission's best proposal. It's hurting their own case by giving the EU commission the easiest retort imaginable. If you really don't want age verification, that's bad, because they usually get the last word in. Better to respond in good faith to the commission's strongest possible argument, rather than do this, which is going to get brushed aside while handing them a win.

LelouBil 1y ago
I found out about this for zero knowledge profs that are able to be separated from the issued document. https://github.com/microsoft/crescent-credentials https://github.com/microsoft/crescent-credentials The demo I saw looked really interesting but I don't have the knowledge to say if the approach is viable or not
rpdillon 1y ago
The laws are all being passed and ZKP is nothing more than a proof of concept. The laws are not being passed in good faith, and so I think it's a mistake to think that ZKP will ever be used. The only two systems I've heard of that have actually been deployed to comply with these laws are either face scanning or ID scanning. Neither one is acceptable, but the legislation is passing anyway.
g-b-r 1y ago
Privacy-preserving good-faith efforts requiring a Google/Apple account and a phone passing Play Integrity (or an iPhone)
- mindslight 1y ago
  They might be "good faith" in terms of the relationship between corpos and government, but they most certainly are not good faith in the relationship between corpos and individual software freedom. One can't simply sprinkle ZKP faerie dust and obtain any desired security properties. These systems simply cannot provide the claimed security properties without relying on treacherous computing that prevents individuals from running the software of their choosing on their own devices.

nine_k 1y ago

How about the scam of lawmaking disconnected from reality :( Introducing laws that are going to be relatively trivially circumvented, which do not provide the protection they purport to provide, and which burden citizens with rather useless but onerous duties, should be called out as a failure at lawmaking. I think the best defense against such laws is to show thoroughly why and how bad and useless such laws are, so that large enough political constituencies (that is, us, citizens) would become interested in fixing or repealing them, and would vote accordingly.

freddie_mercury 1y ago

So the argument is that, even though age verification is required for this line of business in the real world, online it shouldn't be required because their ad-supported model won't be profitable?

BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
They argue it won’t work and will hurt people more than it helps.
- lp0_on_fire 1y ago
  Bars and Casinos argued the exact same thing when we mandated they check the IDs of a patron before serving them a drink. The world didn't stop spinning.
  - BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
    But the law applied to almost all bars because it’s more enforceable. I don’t mean to white knight for the porn company but I think it’s a good point.
    - amradio1989 1y ago
      It's not really a good point. Yes it's more difficult, but that doesn't exempt them from complying. And they've made basically zero effort to comply. You could argue quite convincingly that the explosion of adult content sites is due largely to evading regulation and reaching a wider (ie: illegal) audience.
      - BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
        What are you talking about though? I don’t care one way or another whether the porn company makes money, fuck em. The problem is if your law doesn’t prevent kids from watching porn but instead pushes them to shadier sites.
      - 1y ago

txrx0000 1y ago

It's much easier to implement user-configurable client-side filters at the application and OS level than censor the entire Internet. But of course that's not what it's about. Online age verification and content moderation was never about protecting anyone. It's about controlling the masses and tricking them into believing that it's for their own good.

crowbahr 1y ago
ID will be a new form of auth. ISO-18013-7 establishes the equivalent of OAuth for electronic ID presentation on the Internet. It's already accepted. Apple and Google announcing the ability to use your ID at TSA is ISO-18013-5 and it's a short hop to 18013-7 from there. We will be barred from accessing sites without valid ID. The question is can we get a few IdPs to provide the ID in a privacy sensitive way (the relying party really only needs to know your age after all). Ideally an international governing body, under the auspices of the UN, holds the IDs and transmits the specific claims when requested and keeps no logs on requests. Realistically it will be Apple and Google and you'll just have to trust them to totally not use the data of what sites request your ID to track you (lmao. lol, even.)
edu 1y ago
I agree that client-side filters would be a great solution, but I see two issues there: 1) Not everybody would know how to do it 2) This creates a weakest link problem, where in a class of say 15 kids, just having one with a non-blocked device would allow for all to see. I don't know what would be good solution, maybe something intermediate... for example, filtering at the ISP level and making it mandatory for them to inform and request the settings for all their customers? Just a form, so they can block it. But then, maybe I want to block porn for my underage kids but not for me or my partner.
- txrx0000 1y ago
  1) It's up to the parents to decide whether they want to put in the effort to look up how to use the parental control settings for their own child. 2) It's up to the child to decide who they want to associate with in school and in society, and up to the parents to advise their child in their decision-making. Presumably, the parents are the ones buying the child's device, so this can be done at the OS level. The parent creates a user account for the child and a password-protected admin account for themselves on the new device, and only allow the firewall settings to be changed by the admin account. We can even implement offline on-device neural network-based detection and filtering, and you decide what to filter. If the child is old enough to work and buy their own device, then it's debatable whether they should be moderated at all. The problem with filtering at beyond the device level is widespread censorship, surveillance, and the erosion of the freedoms of the common man. The systems being built for supposedly the safety of the children are much too powerful that I can't help but question their true purpose.

cpa 1y ago

I got the French version and was really confused, since it randomly mentioned autonomous vehicles on the page. Turns out, Age Verification = AV = Autonomous Vehicle. That's why you do quality control on AI-generated content :^)

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

blitzar 1y ago

The biggest impact I have experienced so far has been that popups for cam sites, porn sites and other such affiliate marketting referal attempts lead to an age verification page rather than directly to all the "hot singles in my area looking for sex". I don't like it, but for the most part the internet is now a better place for me to browse.

johtso 1y ago
Do you not use an adblocker? I can't remember the last time I saw that kind of ad..
- blitzar 1y ago
  DNS level and in browser ad blocking. Still not enough to overcome some of the more agressive parts of the internet.

littlecranky67 1y ago

The article is a bit one-sided (yes, they have an agenda): > But that comparison is dishonest: on a gambling or merchant site, users already expect to submit personal data — credit card info, name, phone number, address. They are paying for something. On a free site, users do not expect to hand over private data. They simply refuse — and move on to other sites. Why wouldn’t they? the success of OnlyFans destroys this argument. It is not that people do not pay for porn - the authors try to uphold their free, ad-based model. But looking at OnlyFans, people absolutely seem to be OK submitting their personal data incl. payment details.

g-b-r 1y ago
Some people

29athrowaway 1y ago

Age verification will make porn websites go out of business. And this is likely what the legislators truly wanted. Porn is partially protected by the constitution and it is politically impopular to tell people what they can't do.

lofaszvanitt 1y ago
Of course it won't. Maybe it will some of the current players. But I think they already have a lot of sites that use the same infra, just with different skins...
scarface_74 1y ago
The state I live in already has age verification. Any site that is not based in the US - including the most popular one - just ignores it. The other sites can be accessed via a VPN.
rpdillon 1y ago
Vought confirmed as much. > "We came up with an idea on pornography to make it so that the porn companies bear the liability for the underage use, as opposed to the person who visits the website [having to] certify that 'I am 18," Vought told the undercover Centre for Climate Reporting staffers. "We've got a number of states that are passing this and then you know what happens is the porn company says 'We're not going to do business in your state'—which, of course, is entirely what we were after." https://reason.com/2024/08/19/age-check-laws-are-a-back-door-to-banning-porn-project-2025-architect-says-in-hidden-camera-video/ https://reason.com/2024/08/19/age-check-laws-are-a-back-door...

precommunicator 1y ago

Most important part: > Device-level parental controls have existed for years, and can actually block a million sites. But politicians can’t take credit for them.

prmoustache 1y ago

It is not like kids/teenager who currently visit the big porn sites like pornhub will say: "Oh I can't, let's read a book instead" They'll just get it somewhere else, private chatrooms, torrents, etc and from probably even less regulated and more nefarious sources that also serve stuff super hardcore or completely illegal.

edu 1y ago
But it will be harder for them, the same way it's harder to get alcohol if you don't have a proper ID, and just that will prevent a good number of them of accessing it or at least accessing it in a regular way.
- triceratops 1y ago
  Why aren't there proposals for online age verification to be exactly like alcohol and tobacco? You can show ID at a real world store and buy an age verification token. The token is good for exactly one user account on one website for one year. The website is responsible for ensuring no account sharing. No need to store IDs online and it's still pretty hard for kids to access anything we don't want them to. Just like alcohol and tobacco there will be straw purchasers who re-sell to minors, and we accept that imperfection. We also punish people who re-sell or give alcohol to minors.
  - dragonwriter 1y ago
    > Why aren't there proposals for online age verification to be exactly like alcohol and tobacco? > You can show ID at a real world store and buy an age verification token. The token is good for exactly one user account on one website for one year I don’t know if you’ve ever bought alcohol or tobacco, either in person or online, but the process in either case, in my experience, does not involve showing government ID at a private business separate from the one you are going to purchase the product from in advance to purchase a single-account, single-year token which you then use to prove age when you purchase the good in question.
    - 1y ago

freestingo 1y ago

A completely absurd and clearly biased article trying to defend the impossible. Age verification is somehow supposed to be bad for online porn content providers (even though it is already mandatory for real-world porn content providers, for obvious reasons) because... it would hurt their profits and is not 100% effective. Child labour laws also severely hurt company profits and are not 100% effective; so much so that companies choose to delocalize production plants in the opposite part of the world, just to be able to continue exploiting workers. I guess child labour laws are bad too, and must be stopped. My favourite and most out-of-touch part of the article was the one in which they argue it is "a fallacy" to think pornography can be harmful to teenagers because "research into pornography’s impact on children is limited and inconclusive — prompting calls for further study". I actually laughed out loud at this part

BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
I definitely don’t wanna take it with more than a grain of salt, but they raise good points I think. For example, the idea it’s only enforced on big players so people will just go to shadier sites sounds like an issue IF it’s true. So it sounds more like it would be like 10% effective at keeping kids off porn.
IshKebab 1y ago
Why did you laugh out loud? It's clear that it doesn't have large impacts on children - otherwise no research would be needed to know this, in the same way we don't really need research to know that over-use of alcohol fuels violence. If there's a small effect then we do need research to show it and that's extremely difficult to do and as far as I know nobody has. Same deal as violent video games. What's your view on those?
classified 1y ago
Could you please point us to credible sources about how online porn is supposed to be harmful to teenagers, beyond “If they knew I'm watching this, they'd laugh at me”? As for the bad article, it's AI-generated slop.
- 1y ago

pcthrowaway 1y ago

While I agree that there's something dystopian about government-mandated age verification on the web, it's amusing to say the least to see porn companies entering discourse on ethics, since the commodification of sexual services under capitalism is already a tough sell to people who are particularly interested in social justice.

BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
Yeah they’re shit too.

jolmg 1y ago

> usually, us and Pornhub Who's "us"? This blog doesn't seem to have an About Us.

jeanloolz 1y ago
Did not know neither and reseatched. Us = xvideos.com the 2nd largest porn site.
classified 1y ago
An AI slop generator isn't strictly part of any "Us".

littlecranky67 1y ago

Love how the articles tiptoes around "Porn users don't want to be identified", yet later in the article they disclose that their current tracking method is able to uniquely identify users and their behaviour.

prmoustache 1y ago

Porn will never disappear the same way prostitution will never disappear. It exists even in countries were people can be faced with death sentences. Instead of age verification, I'd rather see a discussion on how to make a form of ethical porn more visible and popular than the one which involves sex trafficking, sexism and violent or degrading practices. I'd rather see good porn more accessible to teenager than letting them use workarounds and visit terrible stuff.