First Porn, Now Skin Cream? ‘Age Verification’ Bills Are Out of Control.

Frankly already a moot point - your browser fingerprints are already uniquely identifying (even before IP, cookies, and backend analytics). Realistically, tho, just more info for them to sell, leak and then eventually pay $0.25 per person in Google Play credit in the class action settlement.

Like, I remember the pirate radio station making a big hubbub during that time when rock n roll was banned in the UK. I could see illegal porn sites operating on ships in international waters, outside the boundaries of US enforcement using satellite connections to get their content out there. Problem is, the US is a little more trigger happy and might just send Navy ships out to sink them. If it happens in international waters nobody has to know.

Yeah. Keep public spaces (meaning, advertising) mostly free of porn. Aside from that, children who are interested in porn and sex are ready for it, let them explore it with the neccessary knowledge and care and avoid abuse from broken grown ups. Laws should be focused on that, a sensible approach, including the parents.

Generally saying "porn only for 18+" doesn't work, since it's a primary instinct.

A device should be able it indicate in its browser headers whether its primary user is an adult or a minor and the service can react accordingly.

I can already see that being used for targeting children with specific ads on the internet.

These ideas are all fundamentally misguided. Let's take a step back what we are trying to do here: We want to create a system so that the government can withhold certain information from certain people. That's both difficult and dangerous.

PornHub's idea requires cooperation from the hosters. You are not likely to get global agreement on that. So you will still need to do something about those foreign sites, such as blocking them.

At that point, such a law would achieve 2 things:

1. Society has decided to create a technical censorship infrastructure.
2. Domestic porn providers have an incentive to support to it because it removes foreign competition.

Blocklists that parents can install on their devices already exist, so there would be no change in that regard.

Of course, minors have no trouble circumventing such software. They have plenty of time and they are horny. You can't win. The only faint hope might be to include such features at deeper levels, similar to existing DRM schemes. This would be ripe for abuse by bad actors or governments. It certainly would be used against the consumer by the copyright industry and tech monopolies; just like existing DRM schemes.

So we really should ask why we would want to walk further down this expensive, hostile, and dangerous path. Are we afraid that masturbation causes blindness?

Kids are babied already but if 14 year olds can vote in party elections, and 16 year olds can consent to sexual intercourse with adults, then I don't think restricting porn is our problem. Either kids can make decisions, or all of these laws need to align with each other more logically.

We have taken parents rights away to allow children to make decisions on their gender and name changes, yet we expect parent to be responsible for their actions like accessing porn.

I could not care less about whatever the final say is on age restrictions, but if there are gonna be rules, at least make them make sense you know? I also do not love that I have to verify my identity to use the internet. Look at the UK and how that's working out there even without IDs. Talk about authoritarian control.

This stuff is the whole reason I switched to this platform.

What's gonna stop a pedo from changing the headers to child so that they can access the child internet where all the children are? Like it's not a great solution to me.

I don't even have kids and I have protection in place at home to block devices from accessing sites, not exclusively porn tho, gambling and social networks.

Porn can be bad, okay, but if we taught our kids properly it's not that bad and curiosity is ok. Gambling is terrible and more and more people are getting addicted to it.

Fuck government paternalism.

idiots

You include the people who voted for it?

Perhaps long term exposure, like these products would be?

VPNs don't help here, the website asks you for your driver's license. Tbf giving your credit card to them is typically enough for them (big tech + govt) to construct a full profile of who you are anyway, and that was the original "age gate" -- though there are some services that make CCs modestly privacy preserving -- not the case for IDs

It's all about the implementation. The Washington bill is treating diet products as similar to alcohol (check ID in-store and on delivery), which seems fine to me.

The NY law seems to be suggesting that dating app services need to collect (and possibly retain) sensitive information on people, like identification, location data. That's troubling to me.