Pornhub blocks Montana and North Carolina as their age verification laws take effect | The website says the states’ ID requirement would put users’ privacy at risk::Montana and North Carolina are the latest to join the list of states with age verification laws for adult platforms.
Thats is unfortunate for those citizens with no access to a VPN.
So pornhub would rather let kids watch porn than comply with age verification laws
Please register your id, sexual preferences, and all your financial information with the government. We know from the history of governments this info would never get abused or leaked or used for something horrific.
No. They would rather effective age verification that doesn’t negatively impact the privacy and liberties of their users. They want a solution, not just a ham fisted excuse to start building the foundations of a social credit system
While care is required, designing a system that only proves that someone is over a specific age is possible without leaking much additional information.
For example a request for age verification can be generated and signed by the porn site. All it needs is a unique ID and the signature. It should expire quickly and can only be used once.
The person identifying themself can send this request to a certifying party (the government in the EU where we trust governments, or I guess some terrible for profit company in the USA because they privatize everyday). The certifying party can sign the request, since they know how old the person is.
The person then returns this verification to the porn site.
In this scenario the porn site never learns anything about the user other than that they are above a given age. The certifying party only knows that the person has gotten an age verification, but not why or where.
There is still possible collusion between the porn site and the verifying party, but in that case the system is not really needed at all. Also metadata tracking is possible (like when a person gets a request and has network traffic to a porn site), but can be mitigated if a user is concerned.
I’m not nearly as afraid of a porn site having information about people as I am about governments having a list of who watches porn on what sites
No they’d rather people not have to upload copies of their photo ID to porn sites or participate in a system where such preferences will be easily stored in a government database. It opens the door for privacy violation, extortion, public humiliation, etc for engaging in legal but socially stigmatized behavior in the privacy of their own homes.
Even that would not be enough to protect Pornhub, too. Some kid gets on their parents’ account? Bam, lawsuit. Even the total ban is not enough. Some kid uses a VPN to access the site? Lawsuit.
It is not physically possible to comply with these laws. (The NC one at least.)
The total ban should protect from lawsuits for vpn use. It’s a case of “we deny service to anyone who logs in from your jurisdiction. This individual logged in from outside that jurisdiction and there’s no way for us to tell that they aren’t” the vpn theoretically could get in trouble though
I hate to break it to you, but teenagers have been circumnavigating around any law the government throws at them since the beginning of time.
This law is particularly ridiculous and poorly thought out. It is easily bypassed and only has potential downsides. It is ripe for abuse and it’s insane anyone supports this level of privacy intrusion.
What is with this fucking dumbass, disingenuous campaign on Lemmy? And I recently saw some dumb cunt arguing that blue states are taking gun rights away from black people, too.
You fucktards really expect people to think that you care about kids or black people?
I assure you, we are not the idiots.
You know they are not doing it for the kids, they want to know if you are gay. By associating people ID to content type they know what YOU watch.
It’s partly but not just that. They want blackmail and they want enforced sexual modesty for all adults. Porn is against their religion and they believe their primary duty is to force others to follow their religion’s rules. And it creating sexually frustrated prudish adults is a plus to them.
I’m just not an authoritarian. I don’t like the government spying on us as it is. Why would I volunteer to give up even more privacy? Consider installing cameras in your home and give the government access to them if you want. Totes just to make sure the kids aren’t doing anything wrong. I’ll skip.
Party of small government!
What kind of a parent are you if you’re not blocking access to these kinds of sites on the devices of your kids?
I’m in a neighboring state and it’s about 50/50 that my ISP gives me an IP address that geolocates to NC. So right now I’m blocked from the site. I don’t go there often but it’s lame.
It also works the other way. A lot of people in state are going to have IP addresses that appear out of state.
All in all, using IP to establish a physical address is VERY imperfect. Especially if you’re targeting people over cellular networks or networks in larger commercial properties.
I look forward to watching people try to sue porn sites that are actively trying to block access to a state.
This is going to be a shit show. It’s a law passed by people who don’t understand the underlying tech.
How exactly would they have cause to sue? “I wasn’t able to wank, so I was harmed.”
Unless these are paying customers? But in that case, the ToS likely explicitly says PH has the right to pull access for any reason, or a specific list of reasons.
A company like PH has lawyers, guaranteed. They wouldn’t be making these moves if they weren’t absolutely certain they were covered legally. It’s not like it’s a mom and pop porn shop.
They should put the block in place before the law gets written to rally support against it
Confused by your messaging, are you suggesting those types of porn are bad? Or attempting to point out their hypocrisy?
12 down votes so far because I called someone out as racist, who is specifically calling out race for no reason. Why don’t these people respond and try to justify it? Because they can’t.
It’s trendy to hate white people, even nonwhite people acknowledge this these days.
I’m usually all about treating everyone as equally as possible, but I think if you’re talking about something specific to the “race” (say now, how black women’s hair has to be styled differently due to physical differences) then it’s acceptable to mention “race”
If you’re looking at some kind of demographic, it’s also all right to mention it. Idk if it’s true that conservative white dudes like gay/trans porn more than anyone else, but I think it’s ok to mention that. Especially since the consumption of gay/trans porn on it’s own isn’t necessarily a negative (unless there’s anything non-consential going on ir someone is underage). It’s more the hypocracy of it all that gets peeps riled up
(I hate the term “race” which is why I shoved it in between quotation marks)
Agreed, but the sentiment I’ve been seeing is that white people = bad because most of the “rich white dude” politicians are somehow the root of our oppression, and them being white is important apparently. It’s not a “white” thing, but a rich politician thing. Every other color of politician and rich person is fucking us all the same, and the “white” thing is a distraction from what’s important and what matters–that our politicians and government aren’t working for the people, regardless of race. But it’s better for them if we’re all angry at eachother, so here everyone is chasing after somewhere easy to put their hatred. And here it is emerging as racism.
