cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/2168303
Archived version: https://archive.ph/1rtQu
Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20230901022438/https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/pornhubs-texas-age-verification-law-violates-first-amendment-ruling-1235709902/
I was wondering their reasoning, here:
We have publicly supported mandatory age verification of viewers of adult content for years, but any method of age verification must preserve user privacy and safety.
Basically, they don’t disagree with mandatory verification, they just wish for it to do so in a way that doesn’t violate the privacy of adults legitimately accessing the content.
Their suggestion for this is:
The only solution that makes the internet safer, preserves user privacy, and stands to prevent children from accessing age inappropriate content is performing age verification at the device level.
Essentially, do age verification on-device, and have the device send the okay to view signal to the site. This is something websites cannot implement on their own, until device/os developers implement such. I agree this is a good solution, but I think it’ll be difficult to push tech companies to do this without further legislation.
I think it might be good to seek the EU to require tech companies to implement such a on-device feature, which will naturally roll out to all tech devices.
Edit: these quotes are from the porn company, not the court.
Such an on-device feature would either be trivial to break (if it’s an ordinary API) or be impossible to implement in an open-source browser and OS (if it’s some locked-down DRM-like thing), and the latter is not privacy-preserving because proprietary software tends to be spyware.
If these moralizers would just shut up, go away, and stop trying to ruin the Internet, that’d be great.
The whole internet censorship doesn’t make any sense to begin with. We already have decades of free online porn and everyone is fine. Why would we try to limit porn usage online now? It’s a cry for regulations from overprotective nannies. These blocks don’t work anyways as it just needs one single kid with access to porn and they’ll share it with the others. To believe we can control that is crazy.
No tool in the world will block new sites emerging not yet added to the filter or people from installing an uncensored browser.
We already have decades of free online porn and everyone is fine. Why would we try to limit porn usage online now?
32 years ago we were passing around 320x240 interlaced jpeg’s on floppy disks downloaded from a 4800baud BBS. You had to be James fucking Bond to view that stuff on the family computer in the living room, or in the back of the computer lab. I remember sitting at the back of lab with some friends watching an image load of a disk and trying to figure out which hole his dick was in. That’s how slow it was.
Today, you can get streaming 4k videos on your 7 inch computer while you’re sitting at the back of the bus, or the back of class. I’d say accessibility to minors has greatly improved over the past 3 decades. Regulators are (as usual) playing catch-up with technology.
I wish regulators good luck trying to regulate bittorrent and other peer to peer software. Not to even talk about what can be found with just installing the tor browser
I agree with your main points, but I don’t think that just because something has been the status quo it doesn’t deserve scrutiny. There are those out there who feel that this is an issue. For them, the best time to explore it is now. At this point it’s futile, but I think it’s important that we re-evaluate our laws and policies when there’s a group asking for it. We just need to make sure the people making the decisions at the end of the day are competent…
Not necessarily.
Recently we got a new LG TV that has an age lock option with some other family settings. The parent can turn it on with a PIN, and they can set up restrictions.
The same approach could be used here. But this would need 2 things: obviously support by the web browser app, and support by the OS to tie app installs, uninstalls and data wipes to the parent’s code.
To help with cases when the device is sold, maybe the parent should press a button every year that they still want this, and also receive an email notification when the period is nearing it’s end.
But a much better solution is that parents are dealing with their children.
They may see up some site filters, but when they notice that their child is using a workaround then it should be punished with taking away the phone.
Just an another HTTP header, flagging if user is an adult. Set it to False if OS reports that the account used has parental controls enabled.
This is just meant to keep children out, not protect state secrets.
Zero knowledge proof. Trusted issuer issues proof of birthdays. User submits proof of minimum age without disclosing additional information.
That would require you to disclose proof of your real-life identity to some dubious company for the purpose of unlocking porn. Definitely not privacy-preserving.
While I agree with most of what you said, I disagree that it’s a good thing for a government malware to be mandatory on everyone’s PC. Because soon the software alone isn’t enough, it needs to be flexible to every counties own law, with extra sniffing features and they’ll enforce that, I guarantee you, then uddenly we opened the devil’s doors.
Where are we talking about installing malware? This could be implemented by the os itself, like many other similar things in the last years as well (password storage, covid nearby activity, …). The os could just ask the user to verify his age by identity card or similar, would then store a flag after verification and a browser -> website can access this.
The only problem I see with this, if there is no verification on the other side, you could “just” have a browser which tells the website that the user is adult, no matter what, or, if it’s more dedicated, could even use a modified version of Linux to always have the flag set, haha.
Or just idk monitor your kids browsing if you wanna be a snooping parent. Leave me the fuck alone with this policy nonsense.
This is actually really good ruling. I’m shocked at the level of level headedness shown here. It’s not on brand America, stop it.
Sounds like they’re basically requiring parental controls on device, which I think is the optimal solution. Though a lot of parental control apps get really privacy invasive.
Makes sense. If a device was flagged as < 18, then that device could include that info in each http request and www sites could respond accordingly.
Would be easy, could be as simple as a checkbox in OS settings or parental security settings that are easily found in Apple & Microsoft.
Why does it remind me of this? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_bit
I remember when age ‘verification’ was a curtain in the video store, or a blackout bag on the magazine rack.
Faptestic!
