As of this week, half of the states in the U.S. are under restrictive age verification laws that require adults to hand over their biometric and personal identification to access legal porn.
Missouri became the 25th state to enact its own age verification law on Sunday. As it’s done in multiple other states, Pornhub and its network of sister sites—some of the largest adult content platforms in the world—pulled service in Missouri, replacing their homepages with a video of performer Cherie DeVille speaking about the privacy risks and chilling effects of age verification.
Archive: http://archive.today/uZB13
It’s only a matter of time before a data leak happens.
That’ll be a fun day.
Hear me out!
What if parents did their fucking job as they should instead of demanding the state to do it for them, only for it to get hijacked by both
- christofascists wanting to make it illegal to not live a “christian life”,
- and corporations wanting to ensure competition will need to pay a shitton of money on age verification AI?
Everyone who ever submits for age verification will have their information stolen. It is a matter of when, not if.
I mean, a VPN is way cheaper than whatever hoops Idaho wants you to jump through to watch some 10/10 goth hottie get their ass eaten.
Yea, but soon we’ll have no states to vpn to, and we will have to start using the Quebec servers, then all the websites will be in French and I’ll have to learn a new language.
Omelette du fromage. Omelette du fromage!
I VPN to Montreal servers. Everything is still displayed in English.
Your response is also supposed to be legally in French.
Interesting…all of it? I’m in Ontario but my hub/ISP is in Quebec so all my random advertising is in French.
Somehow it knows to target advertising to you in English…maybe you need to work on your privacy?
I’ve got a lot of privacy stuff, but I also know that I’m being tracked. I’m not using the VPN for privacy though. I’m using it to watch porn, so I don’t really care. If I did want privacy there’s a lot of things I could improve, but I’m not that worried about it.
As for the targeted advertising, I don’t see any of that. I wouldn’t be surprised if that were in French but I wouldn’t know.
Yeah…I don’t really know what I’m talking about…it’s not like I make much of an effort for privacy. I’m guess it’s just my particular ISP. It’s like…the random advertising is in French…but if they know who I am it’s targeted…it’s mixed.
Languages accepted by the user is like the second header in http. It’s in all your requests.
This is the plan all along. It’s not about porn, it’s not even about control. It’s about teaching Americans a second language. You know who’s behind this? Duolingo and Big Language.
soon we’ll have no states to vpn to
I’ve yet to see any state legislature take that proposal seriously. Unlike trying to make porn sites take your credit card info in advance (a policy they hated so much gosh darn it!) you’re really fucking with the money when you try and regulate VPNs. Also, just… not really that practical. For the same reason Congress has been pretty toothless when it comes to regulating Torrents and digital encryption, going after VPNs at the regulatory level is something of a technological rabbit hole.
then all the websites will be in French
Nothing will ever make anyone on the internet learn a language other than English.
I’ve yet to see any state legislature take that proposal seriously
snekerpimp meant if every state requires ID, then VPN to another state will not get around the ID check.
Setting aside the fact that there’s no appetite for these laws in liberal states because its purely a conservative fetish, you can still get porn on the internet without going to the big corporate online clearinghouses.
FFS, there was porn on Napster back in the day.
There’s no appetite for these laws in the voter public of any state, as far as I can tell given how VPN usage skyrockets in every state where these laws are put in place. Is California no longer liberal? Also consider the people running sites in any of the states that have such a law. They may resort to just blanket ID-checking everyone rather than risk prosecution.
There’s no appetite for these laws in the voter public of any state
Evangelical right-wing states have a huge contingent of politicians who compete with one another to be the toughest on “child sex trafficking” and other Epstein-tangential topics. So, in the GOP primary, you get a lot of promises about how you’re going to round up all the pedos and put them to the sword or whatever. And this inevitably manifests as “please insert your dick into this pepper grinder to access the pornography” laws, as a sort-of practical compromise.
Is California no longer liberal?
Current Status: Failed (2024-08-15: In committee: Held under submission.)
Looks like they’re retaining their title. That said, if you peak under the “Supporters and Opponents” what you’re going to see in the Supporters section is a litany of right-wing evangelical organizations and a couple of mega-corps.
They may resort to just blanket ID-checking everyone rather than risk prosecution.
The current strategy appears to be refusing to host content in the regulated states. Even then, there are plenty of social media and general content distribution channels that dodge the regulation by claiming to be content-blind in how they serve their data. I don’t see Facebook or YouTube getting the business end of any of these regulations. Almost as though they’re toothless if you’ve got enough money to tip your Congresscritters.
Napster was audio only. Did you mean limewire, or kazaa, or one of the many napster clones that came after?
Napster was audio only.
It was file type specific and had a soft file side limit, but that’s easy enough to work around.
Did you mean limewire, or kazaa, or one of the many napster clones that came after?
They all had it as well, yes
… and then all that will be left will be .onion sites
Is there a French version of /c/ich_iel?
I can only assume it would be something like !moi_evv if it existed.
because you actually watch porn for the plot?
Heh. I’m in Ontario, but I guess my DNS is outta Quebec…so most of my banner/insert advertising is in French. It’s fucking awesome because I have no idea what they’re saying or advertising to me most of the time. Highly recommend.
States are also considering banning VPNs now as well. This will never work and is a horrible idea, but it’s being considered.
States are also considering banning VPNs now as well.
Well, some legislators have proposed taking wack-a-mole to the next level and demanding all VPNs be certified and regulated. But good luck getting that passed through the Silicon Valley Presidency or the Ancap Courts.
I would count on them being hypocritical. The rich will just use Starlink.
StarLink connections still exit on the ground, sometimes in a different state. You could gain access or get denied pron based on where your ground IP ends up.
Yeah then Elon can blackmail them instead of someone else
As a watcher from the outside:
It might not be fun to hear but vpn is neither the solution to government oppression nor a solution against tracking (recently there was a good article regarding that) so all you do is pay more.
Welp, now I’m off to XHamster. Thank a ton >B|
yeah I barely can bring myself to give like Fidelity or Charles Schwab photos of my ID, just even having a digital image of my ID on my computer feels wrong lol
I just went through fun trying to explain to a company that my company is a contractor for why I wouldn’t be scanning my passport and emailing it to them.
Ironically? If we were a less prudish society this genuinely wouldn’t matter.
“Oh no! Sarah likes threesome porn. Uhm… okay?”
I don’t think that’s the main reason folks are concerned about having their government IDs stolen.
Yeah, people already browse porn with zero privacy precautions, so linking their fetishes to them would be trivial. The main concern is having yet another privacy vulnerability vector for identity theft.
And there are so many of those these days that a new one genuinely doesn’t matter.
If you haven’t been offered a free year of identity theft insurance recently? Some company/org is plugging their ears.
SSNs are a fundamentally broken system (look it up). Photo IDs? I will guarantee you that if you go to ANY city there is someone at the DMV who will look up whatever you want for fifty bucks. The ONLY reason credit card fraud is less massive than it is (and it is MASSIVE) is because the CC companies put in the effort to monitor that and lock it down.
EVERYONE should have their credit records locked unless they are actively applying for something.
No. the issue with these is that we live in an increasingly christofacist society where even looking at porn makes you Unclean. And if you look at the wrong porn? Off to the reeducation camps with you!
Um, having direct access to pull my government photo ID is a huge deal. Lots of online services require photo ID or other more in-depth verification to pull loans and stuff. So yes, this new vector IS a serious concern.
And paying someone $50 at any DMV? C’mon, man, that sounds like some unfounded bullshit. Hardly anyone is going to risk a cushy government job with solid benefits and great hours for fucking $50, let alone the potential risk of going to jail.
Your “government photo ID” really isn’t all that useful unless people are skilled enough to make fakes (which is a whole different mess). What matters is your SSN, your credit card number, your address, etc.
And those are basically everywhere.
As for the DMV thing: You sweet summer child.
As for the DMV thing: You sweet summer child.
Lol, dude, I’m in my early 40s. Go to the DMV and try bribing a government official and report back. Please. I beg of you.
this “you’d have to make a fake to use it!!” argument is especially ridiculous when you’ve posted on a story about submitting a picture of your photo ID in place of a physical one. and one of the pieces of info you say actually “matters” is literally written on said ID
You’re living in a movie.
It’s not really about the porn in the first place (for advertisers it is - they hate sex unless it’s selling their product). The porn is merely an avenue to attack another minority group. In this case, LGBTQ people. Make everything about them sexual in some way, and then ban them from life for sexual deviancy.
Oui Oui, on my face…
I’m just over here in “hellscape” California enjoying the freedom to not have to do this, and I can walk down the street to the weed shop, and my girlfriend still has basic human rights over her own body.
Do any other states, like Texas, need some of our freedom? We’ve got some to spare.
This is going to expand. The next wave is going to be keeping kids off of social media. That means they will have to be age-verified, which they can’t do, because they’re kids, and don’t have ID. Instead, everyone else will have to be age-verified in order to use the Internet.
Here in Florida, I’ve already heard one state lawmaker scoffing at any objections, saying it’s the same way we keep kids from buying alcohol - by checking EVERYONE’S ID. Now they’re going to do it for the Internet. Every movement and post you make on the Internet will be directly tied to your verified identity. That should be perfectly fine, as long as you aren’t doing or saying anything wrong, right?
The most important issue facing the world: Someone might be jerking off in the privacy of their own home.
The end game here is to require ID for social media in order to suppress dissent. This is an easy first step due to the longstanding controversy surrounding pornography.
It’s all about control.
The end game here is to require ID for social media in order to suppress dissent.
in 7 days, that’s what australia will have.
The end game is id for everything including spending money.
Isn’t this all part of project 2025?
The goal is get tokenized everything attached to an id so that everything you do is tracked to that id.
Thats why government is getting involved with crypto and they want land purchases and material purchases (gold, silver etc) to be tokenized like crypto so that all of a person’s life is digitized and trackable.
That’s the purpose of this whole admin. It’s not just trump… I think this is all more likely to be a coup style maneuver by CIA to move America into a modern digitized lifestyle because it would be easier for the government. And they know if they put it bluntly and allowed the people authentic votes it wouldn’t happen… So this way they have trump and friends to be the fall guys that take the blame when reality it IS “the American government” and not simply psycho trump and friends.
All this has been a long game that started long before trump. I think Whitney webb is right in that it’s the world intelligence agencies attempting to move the 1st world into new age of modern surveillance. And it also makes sense when you look at the Epstein bullshit and Israel vs Gaza bullshit… All the connections come together and it becomes more credible.
It’s a sad sad culture we chose to fund for “protection” and “security”. We are nothing but cattle to them.
We are nothing but cattle to them.
It’s also why they get upset about the declining fertility rates and when people choose not to reproduce.
Social media has mostly divided and isolated us. Twitter and some other platforms have been useful communications channels during unrest. But there could be other forms of communication just for that, since it’s all owned by billionaires now anyway, we need to stop imagining them as reliable tools.
I hope to Darwin social media ends up requiring ID. I believe it would do wonders for democratic discourse. It was only last week, a number of large US right-wing accounts were revealed to be driven from outside the US. Is it healthy for democracies that so many people pay heed to foreign actors?
If you write an op-ed for a newspaper, the newspaper need to identify you as there is an editor who is responsible for what gets written in the paper. This ensures there’s someone who can stand to account for any libellous statements.
With social media we immediately reneged on this and allowed them to wash their hands; “we are just a channel” is a pretty bleak statement to make when the discourse on social media destroys the lives of minorities, encourages suicide, undermines our democracy with AI and troll farm bots.
And we can do this is a privacy preserving way - of course the social media companies feeds the opposite narrative because they don’t want to implicated in the piles of shit they shovel on top of our democracy.
If social media was required to ensure they could tie an account to a real person, which they needn’t reveal unless forced to by a court order, we would know that we were engaging with a real opinion, not something coughed up by a Putin-run AI bot or a Chinese troll farm.
The system required isn’t that complex.
A social media
- a social media company is opening a new account.
- it sends the person opening the account to any of the multitude of ways we can already verify identity online.
- the person is identified and issued an identity token, which gets sent to the social media company.
- the social media company says “great, this person is real and we can, if required by a court order, work with the identity company to reveal who this person is is”. Right now, all the social media company has is a token.
- the account is opened.
In a system likes this, the identity company doesn’t know who the person is; that sits with the social media company.
Nor does the identity service know which account is actually posting for this real person, all they know is they verified someone as part of an account opening process.
Social media should be treated like the press - make them accountable for what gets posted and allow them to place this accountability on a real person by labelling posts “op-eds” if, and only if, they know who is doing the posting.
We are letting large, anonymous money-men ruin our democracy behind the veil of “free discourse”. It’s not free to the many people who gets harmed by it.
I’m not going to give up my privacy over your fear of foreign bogeymen.
It’s all fun and games until the government decides that it really doesn’t like dissenting opinions. We’ve already seen serious erosion of 1A rights in the U.S.
It would be one thing to have this in a world with benevolent leadership. But that isn’t the world we are living in.
It would be one thing to have this in a world with benevolent leadership. But that isn’t the world we are living in.
So, Fantasyland, then. The closest anyone gets to benevolent leadership is their own parents, and that’s only maybe 50-50.
The closest anyone gets to benevolent leadership is their own parents
Which just so happens to be the people who should be responsible for monitoring internet usage. This is a job for parents, not the government.
Bogeymen are imaginary. Political troll farms are real.
They certainly are real, but their machinations are misunderstood. They often consist of people in poor countries looking to make a buck. Follow the money. You’ll find that even if you were to build a great firewall for your country of residence, troll farms will still reach you, and that domestic astroturf ain’t any greener than foreign astroturf.
That’s the point.
You, as a common citizen, should not have to. But the moment you feel like to share your thought or opinion, you should be identifiable and made responsible for it.
The current social media outlets shield behind the argument they act solely as channels while at the same time fostering and allowing for “anonymous” groups or individuals to spout whatever views they want, often views that deter from advancing social and civilizational progress. Hence the current state of the world, with authoritarianism on a rise and hight like there wasn’t in nearly 70 years.
When the internet was made of individual websites, the person behind it was automatically made responsible for whatever they put on it. That was fair and reasonable.
Pushes like this, is assigning suspition/guilt before any wrong doing.
I will grant the overall facilitated acess to pornography is damaging the kids. There are already enough studies showing how the early access to porn is related to bad interpersonal relations on social, emotional and sexual level.
But this does not imply you should be identifying yourself to access adult content or anything on the web. Just impose curation. If it’s available to the public, you’re responsible for it.
Old school “dirty” books and magazines stores had controlled access and the really hardcore stuff was well out of reach of who should not get to it. Free porn is nice but there are things available that should be behind pay walls or at least registry, with identity verification.
If your point is to stifle dissent, then sure. Whoever controls the narrative will make contradiction look unacceptable. If your name is tied to an opinion that may be construed as contrary to the dominant narrative, you will hesitate to post it, and if you do post it, then you will be taken down with very real consequences because of that tie to your real identity. Employers already look at social media to determine if your behavior is considered acceptable to them, even if you keep your professional life completely separate. Your proposal only destroys free speech further by making it worth less and less the cost of expressing.
Make no mistake, the excuse of protecting children from pornography is just that, an excuse, to restrict freedom of speech by putting into place the mechanisms to identify people and strike at them for daring to express their opinions. Pornography being in the form of books, magazines, tapes, DVDs, whatever physical media did not necessarily control access. There are many with stories of how they managed to gain access as children, either through a parent’s collection or otherwise. Similarly, this internet ID bullshit can be defeated, but it’ll be backed by stricter and stricter legislation to make defeating it illegal and they won’t be prosecuting children or the companies providing the ID verification service, they’ll be prosecuting adults using tools to defeat these mechanisms to express their opinions.
No, it’s not my point, although there is a difference between expressing ideas, no matter how contrarian or controversial they may be, and spouting hate or other positions detrimental to advancement.
I am aware of what you mention of companies sniffing for the social media of employees and potential applicants. It is a shameful practice. And if it is illegal in my country, has it is viewed as trespassing on one’s privacy, it should be as welll any and everywhere.
Nobody should be ashamed nor afraid of expressing their opinions and ideas. Unfortunately, freedom of expression is often confused with the hability of saying whatever one feels like it, which is not.
What you describe (and fear, I take) is persecution. And that already tells whatever system an individual lives in is already deep into veering towards blatant suppression of rights. The US case is so off the rails it deserves an entire category to itself but it is only one among too many.
On the question of banning access to pornography I am completely against it. Yet I can not and will not deny the amount of evidence that supports that early and easy access to it is in fact tainting how people in general and kids in particular understand how relations are constructed. Pornography is really good at teaching wrong things. Nothing against it per se, it can be fun, but it should be consumed just like sugar, tobbacco and alcohol: in moderation and knowing of its ill effects.
I personally started reading erotic books much sooner than it was supposed. I recognize that curiosity towards sex and sexuality is ingrained in what makes us humans. I’m not advocating for banning adult material of any sort. What I would like to see would be clear boundaries for that specific content, for it not reaching those who are not expected to access it unware. It can’t be written off to caveat emptor. Even less because a lot of it is “free”.
The web is as it is today in great measure due to porn. There was a lot of money being poured into technology to facilitate access to it and in high definition. Let’s be thankful for it but that is it. It can be almost ubiquious nowadays, along with casinos and crypto. It’s too much and too much of a good thing is bad for everyone. Remember death by snu-snu.
I have no illusion we, as a species and a civilization, are going through a very dark period. Again. All the prior should have been able to sink in the lesson but we are either too sttuborn or too stupid to learn. Censoring, wide spread control of ideas, knowledge and thought is detrimental to a fair and free society.
Excuses like “protecting children”, “fighting terrorism”, etc, are, as you correctly said, excuses to make advances on individual rights and liberties. But we should be as concerned by now that companies do whatever they can to reach their goals and we are being force fed too many things that are not good for us. Two wrongs don’t make a right but something has to change. Perhaps ceasing to be afraid of being responsible by one’s own ideas and words would be a good start. Maybe stop feeding social media would be another. And perhaps reigning in companies on bad practices could be another.
I am not doxxing myself because the paranoia will likely continue in such a scenario.
And what’s next? Suspecting US citizens of being foreign agents and then sicking the FBI on them?
Unlike you, I’m not going to be cheerleading the return of McCarthyism.
Fortunately I live in a country where the government can (broadly) be trusted.
About eight years ago, I moved out of the US to a Third World country but each day it feels less and less like a Third World country.
This may be the real reason r’s are losing all of the elections, lol. They are entirely red states.
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/16/adult-website-age-verification-states
Yeah, I will never show my ID to a fucking porn site, get real
fucking porn site
No need to be redundant
Then you can’t offend god by watching it and masturbating, like we intended!
-The Puritans pushing this legislation.
I would like to dispute the primary supposition here that pornography is harmful. The use of pornography is nearly universal, and most of the harms that it supposedly causes are symptoms of other issues, or are invented to impose control of sexuality. The ability to reach out with the power of the law to impose religious edicts or project sexual hangups is one of the most esoteric, yet effective, forms of political control available other than violence. If you can control the way that people express their sexuality, you can probably also control their views through the monetization and restriction of sex.
Sexuality and privacy are human rights, and the creation of and access to pornography is protected by the first and fourth amendments under which so-called “age verification” is an unnecessary and excessive burden. If the idea is to prevent access to children, ask yourself why now all adults must now have their access prevented or interrupted.
Furthermore, it is not the state’s role to control childhood sexual development, and the idea that porn is harmful to minors is debatable at best and dubious at worst. Access to objectionable material is solely at the discretion of parents. The fact that they cannot effectively manage this is a symptom of another problem.
When Meta shows teenage girls makeup ads after they delete their selfies, or streaming apps are flooded with violent movies that are easily accessible to minors, this is acceptable. But when I want to watch porn it’s now my job to “protect minors” by compromising my privacy and security?
The real “danger” here is the availability of ideas that do not align with state power.
Feels like half the country wants to outlaw gay marriage and reimplement sodomy laws, so we’re not exactly coming at this issue from a great place right now.
I think i agree for the most part.
These energies would be better spent ensuring that porn stars aren’t being exploited and have access to appropriate support.
No offence to anyone, but this post strikes me as coming straight from a spokeperson for Aylo (formerly MindGeek). A mix of baseless claims and straight up misinformation, that happen to align with the company’s business model.
You speak as if porn sites are analogous to social media and it’s perfectly normal to record your experiences and post them online. Which it absolutely isn’t, anywhere in the world. ‘Expressing your sexuality’ and porn are entirely separate and have very little to do with each other.
It is widely known and confirmed that pornographic content comes with a broad spectrum of negative effects, especially for children and adolescents. The latter really should be common sense in 2025. Watching porn isn’t always bad and can be beneficial in some ways (as some sources below even highlight), but those cases represent a small minority.
Below are some quotes and just a few out of countless sources providing much more reliable information on the topic of pornography’s effects. I strongly recommend reading at least some, because this comment is like ignoring decades of scientific literature and traveling in time back to the 1700s.
Prolonged exposure to pornography is known to lead to habituation, resulting in blunted processing of pleasurable stimuli and greater sensitivity to negative stimuli (21). Continuous use of pornography impairs emotional processing capacity and flattens affect, reducing emotional connection to real-life sexual experiences.
Source: Impact of pornography consumption on children and adolescents
Research shows that frequent porn use hijacks the brain’s reward system and changes the brain’s structure, much like addictive substances.
This means that prolonged pornography use can weaken natural pleasure responses and reinforce compulsive behavior.
A 2014 study found that heavy porn users showed significantly reduced activity in critical areas of the brain responsible for motivation and impulse control, suggesting long-term neurological rewiring.
Source: The Hidden Cost of Pornography: How It Shapes Your Brain and Behavior
Age of first exposure was significantly associated with reported need for longer stimulation and more sexual stimuli to reach orgasm when using pornography, decrease in sexual satisfaction, and quality of romantic relationship, neglect of basic needs and duties due to pornography use, and self-perceived addiction in both females and males. (…) In the opinion of most of the surveyed students, pornography may have adverse effects on human health, although access restrictions should not be implemented.
Additional sources:
Assuming what you’re saying about the harms of consuming pornography, is it the state’s responsibility? Is it a top priority? Do we trust conservatives to implement a solution in good faith?
The answer to all of those I think is no.
There’s no analogous ID check for violent media, so far as I know.
There could be a raging wildfire and I would hesitate if a Republican said “let me deal with it”. They are fundamentally untrustworthy.
That’s on top of the deep irony of the same party that goes on about “small government” and “parents rights” is typically the same one pushing draconian anti-porn laws. It’s a joke. “A government small enough to fit in your bedroom”. Their motivations are so corrupt I am extremely skeptical of anything they propose.
Assuming what you’re saying about the harms of consuming pornography, is it the state’s responsibility?
In general, yeah. It’s quite literally what the government is supposed to be for. When there’s a widespread problem affecting a lot of people, it’s precisely the government’s job to step in, regulate and solve it.
Is it a top priority? Do we trust conservatives to implement a solution in good faith?
These two I can agree with the answer being ‘no’. The problem isn’t that it’s not an issue or that the government shouldn’t interfere. The two main problems I can identify here are:
- The current American government (and most of the previous ones) cannot be trusted to handle this in good faith,
- There are several more pressing matters that should be addressed first.
And a bonus issue. There’s currently no sufficient and reliable infrastructure to even implement restrictions on pornography, as we can plainly see from the results of recent attempts. But this ties in to the first problem. If they really wanted to solve the issue in any capacity, obviously they’d start by building the necessary digital infrastructure.
All in all, I think you brought up important points and I pretty much fully agree with you on them. However, to me it seems like they’re not exactly relevant to the discussion. Or at least that’s not what I was trying to address.
My main goal was to refute the previous guy’s theses that pornography has no confirmed negative effects on people, especially the part about children, since it literally takes seconds to find dozens of studies on this topic. I didn’t mean to speak about whether or not the government should do anything, let alone defend the current US efforts to regulate porn, if we can even call them that. In fact, one of the studies I quoted stated that the participants did not feel a government intervention is needed, which I felt was a crucial detail to highlight.
Prolonged exposure to pornography is known to lead to habituation, resulting in blunted processing of pleasurable stimuli and greater sensitivity to negative stimuli (21). Continuous use of pornography impairs emotional processing capacity and flattens affect, reducing emotional connection to real-life sexual experiences.
Source: Impact of pornography consumption on children and adolescents
This is disingenuous. This issue is caused by prolonged use, as in unhealthy addictive behavior. Framing it as a result of porn access in general is flagrantly dishonest.
Actually it seems like all of your points regard excessive and unhealthy usage. You’re portraying these as results of any level of exposure and that is blatantly dishonest.
It’s probably the FREE STATES OF FREEDOM STATES!
It’s not just for porn anymore though. My new phone required it to use certain applications. Facebook requires it to sell on marketplace. As for conversations about it, all of this went to supreme court at least 6 months ago, spoilers, they lost in terms of protecting our privacy. There are days THEY win inside my head & I assume they’re recording & adverty within my dreams. you don’t even need to be a tin-hat wear crazy to believe things like that anymore.
So much for small government…
I’m not against proper age verifications as such, it would be like carding people in a store or a bar. But I just haven’t seen an implementation of it that isn’t prone to being a privacy nightmare and surveillance state shit.
I know there’s some systems that generate a token that verify that you are 18 and you give that to the site, so neither side directly meet so to say. The site knows only that you have a valid token for being 18 and the app or service you use to generate the token knows just that you wanted to token for something. I think Spain was figuring out a system like that.
When you are carded at a club the staff doesn’t scan your card and keep it on file. They simply look at it and return it.
As someone who worked similar jobs and would have had to look at tons of IDs every day I can assure, I dont have the time or interest in remembering all of them.
There’s a lot of bars/restaurants that do.
I have literally been refused service because the only ID I had is a passport, and those barcodes wouldn’t scan into their system.
It’s Papers, please, and it’s fucking bullshit
They denied your passport? That is like literally the highest level of ID you can present! Holy fuck!
There’s a lot of bars/restaurants that do.
Seconded; it’s why I put a removable white label over the barcode on the back of my license.
That’s really what the whole rest of my reply was about. We need a system more like carding and less like giving them copy of your passport.
The UK experienced a major data breach with all their government info from their ID checks not long after the law kicked in. How many fucking data breaches do we need before people catch on?
Exactly. Just have a system that has basically no other info than “they had a valid token showing they’re 18”. Nobody does anything with that info if there’s a data breach.
I think people don’t realize just how dangerous this shit is until they have been affected in some noticeable way, and even then they will not link just how the incredible amount of surveillance they are under every day is the cause of it.
I worked in tech support for 7 years, and one thing that will never cease to astonish me is how tech illiterate people are. Do you have any idea how many people called me and demanded that I make modifications to their account and refused to tell me any verifying information? While some might have been malicious actors , most aren’t. Most of them were genuinely expecting me to do everything for them and they wouldn’t even tell me what their name is. They fully expected that somehow we would already know they are just from them calling…
Some of them called me on a number not recognized by the system but they fully expected me to pull up their account (fucking how?) Without any information at all.
When you have worked in this field long enough you will know why there is so little effective opposition to all this shit. It is not just because they dont give a damn if we are literally in a 1984 scenario with active cameras and microphones in people’s homes, but they just dont understand what that really means. Even younger people who grew up with these devices from early childhood don’t fully understand just how much they are being observed. If anything Gen Z and Gen Alpha are more fucked since they are the first generation of people whom the algorithms and data brokers have had some profile on since early childhood.
As an elder millennial who grew up in a techie family with computers from childhood. I am fortunate in that they have nothing on me from early childhood to teen years. By the time I hit 20 the internet was still too chaotic and underdeveloped and algorithms weren’t the norm yet (and I was never a Google guy to begin with). But people born within the last 10 years can’t have that privilege.
Why does everyone in the US card everyone over something ostensibly about age?
It’s never been about age.
I’ve seen a seventy year old man with a foot long white beard get carded and refused, while he was stone cold sober.
Do you think he can’t handle his liquor? He’s seventy. He knows what it does.
They might have some rule about carding everyone
Also the fact no companies are ever held liable for losing all your personal info, I sure as hell don’t trust this, it can backfire at all.
Incompetence is one big reason why current style systems are just a no-go for me.
Same.
the easiest thing would be making the internet as a whole 18+.
under 18 would be restricted to a firewalled version and age info would be part of the cellphone or internet plan. on a family plan…? under 18s get a firewalled plan. home internet? have a family and home internet? owner of the service gets a pin to disable the firewall. when everyone in the house hold is over 18, the service is unlocked.
the truth is that none of this is actually about porn or kids, its about the new world lifestyle of surveillance state getting a foot in the door. thats why all this bullshit aligns with other aspect of modern political and business tech agendas
We are blinded by the fact that the teens are involved in this too, and they deserve equality as well. The internet is made to build bridges - get rid of boundaries - not set false narratives and infantilise those that are really impacted in this situation and have full awareness of the status quo.
This is a foot in the door technique that uses our deceived emotional manipulation, where our age discrimination is the secret ingredient in this fascist circus.
Clearly, no-one involved in making these laws has ever heard of OAuth. Not every single site needs to manage your identity / credentials. The government already has this info, they can be the identity provider and use OAuth to grant access to age-gated resources without giving any personal data to the platform. Someone mentioned id.me, and I’m pretty sure that’s how that platform works, though they’re a private entity if I understand their site correctly.
I know most politicians are comically tech-illiterate, but it’s so frustrating to see them constantly implement terrible solutions to already solved problems without asking a single expert who knows how this shit works.
That being said, California passed a bill with a not perfect, but better approach. User age is configured on the OS level when a user account is set up, and then it will tell platforms what age category the user belongs to, and nothing more:
(a) An operating system provider shall do all of the following:
(1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.
(2) Provide a developer who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user with a digital signal via a reasonably consistent real-time application programming interface that identifies, at a minimum, which of the following categories pertains to the user:
(A) Under 13 years of age.
(B) At least 13 years of age and under 16 years of age.
© At least 16 years of age and under 18 years of age.
(D) At least 18 years of age.
(3) Send only the minimum amount of information necessary to comply with this title and shall not share the digital signal information with a third party for a purpose not required by this title.
I think iOS already does this, actually.
The CA bill is also dystopian nightmare fuel… The US isn’t going to build an enormous firewall like other countries have, we are just going to pass a bunch of stupid laws and threaten companies to block our citizens from access instead. Put the burden of building the wall on someone else, the modern American Way™!
An entire generation of fuck-wad parents that just gave their kid a tablet and zero supervision instead of actually raising them are now using their failings as an excuse to control the population; control their devices, control their habits, control their knowledge, and control their thoughts.
The bill I mentioned actually relies on parents configuring their kid’s devices. The system it describes just gives online (and even offline) platforms a standardized way of asking the OS what age category a user is as defined at account setup–hardly “dystopian nightmare fuel”…
This isn’t going to stop unsupervised children, which is it’s own problem that technology doesn’t (and probably can’t) solve.
It requires every Operating System and “App Store” to know the user’s age. It requires every piece of software installed to receive the age-range token. It could be catastrophically bad for the open source community - the bill does nothing to define how these tokens are communicated and received. The largest players in the industry can use their market share to exert control over how it happens and bully anyone that doesn’t get on board. For example, Google could tie it to the Play Integrity/Services and effectively kill 3rd party roms and possibly even open source app stores like fdroid, or all side-loading entirely if it was tied into the Play Store enough.
The bill isn’t specifically a privacy dystopian nightmare, but it is still a dystopian nightmare. We need the government and mega-corps to have less influence and control over our devices, this gives them more.
Greedy companies do shit like that regardless of any laws. I don’t think this law makes it any more likely.
FOSS developers could create an ethical solution while still remaining legally compliant. The language is generic enough to allow for different implementations.
They try to do it all the time, but there is actually some push-back from the law - google recently lost an anti-trust case, the eu passed laws to protect “side-loading”, etc. This new legislation gives them a legal backing. “Oh no, I’m sorry you can’t get your app store working on Android. We aren’t stopping side-loading or other app markets, we are just complying with the legal age-verification requirements”.
While true, a government IDP would still be able to track what sites you’re using your tokens at, which is not great.
Agreed, but you’d think they would prefer that. The way it is now, they have no way of knowing which platforms have your government IDs.
Though, let’s be real, all they need to do is pay a data broker for the tracking data that’s already being collected everywhere.
I wonder how different Linux distros are going to implement this
By creating a plaintext dotfile in $HOME, I’d reckon. Minimum effort, gets the job done. Users can lie when setting up the account so protecting the file against tampering is pointless.
But more likely, not a single distro will implement anything by default because it doesn’t make sense to change your internationally-distributed OS because one state in one country passed a stupid law.
The US government already uses a clearing house service, id.me, for it’s own verification systems. Why is this not used for this purpose as well instead of forcing the site owners to collect and protect that data? It’s stupid and unnecessary. There is literally already a system in place that they aren’t even considering using.
I’m 1000% against this age verification bullshit, not only because of the privacy and data reasons, but also because getting carded in a bar or at a store is also bullshit.
It Is Papers, please.
It’s Never a question of if you’re old enough, it’s a question of “Do I think you’re human enough?”
And more often than is reasonable, the answer is no, they don’t think you’re a person, who should be able to spend their money as they like.
