By this I mean sites requiring stricter validation for accessing adult content, rather than just a simple checkbox. Stuff like credit card details or photos of government IDs.
This has been something that’s been rattling around in the back of my mind for a while now. And with the place I live passing legislation requiring porn sites to use stricter verification, it’s starting to feel like a real thing that can happen.
And… Honestly, it looks like this is probably going to start to be a thing everywhere, seeing how the world is going. To the point where VPNs are probably not going to stay a good way of bypassing it.
It’s causing me an unhealthy amount of worry, because of all the privacy implications and the fact that it means some sites could pull out of my country entirely.
I figure I may as well ask people’s thoughts and experiences here, rather than reading the same articles on Google over and over.
So, I guess some questions:
- Have you done any of this kind of verification before? How did you find it? Do you trust them with your identity?
- Would you consider sending images of your government ID to Discord/Google/Twitter/Bluesky/Furaffinity/esix to access adult content? They promise they use a third party verifier and delete it after use, of course.
- What about using less “important” forms of ID, like phone numbers, credit card numbers and whatever AI face scanning technology is hot right now?
- What about verifying for Yiffit and/or your favourite mastodon/lemmy servers? Presumably they’ll also defer to a third party verifier, but I feel they’ll try to go for a privacy focused one.
And let’s not talk too much about specific jurisdictions and whether or not they are “right” to do this kind of thing. Or if it’s going to be effective or not. I’m sure we all have thoughts about this, but that conversation isn’t likely to go anywhere.
@wander , if you have the time, I’d also be interested in hearing your thoughts on this, as a site operator. Especially considering France is one of the places trying to push this.
There is no technological solution proposed yet so I can only speculate. But there are ways to make sure no personal information is exchanged.
The token doesn’t need to be unique to you. You simply have a global token for each age bracket that changes every 15 minutes or so. Unless you are the only person to use that token they will have a hard time tracking you.
And there isn’t even the need to send a request to the service. You make the verification self-contained with the site you are signing up to. Kinda how some authenticatiors work. They still work even if you are offline. You just gain the code to the authenticator after verifying your age.
Then organizations that concern themselves with privacy can monitor the system to see if any unnecessary communication is made. You probably could even track it yourself.
Saying we where fine for the past 30 years isn’t a good argument. The situation changed, children have more and more access to the internet. Pushing the responsibility on the parents won’t work. Especially not blocking sites in your router. We already see it with piracy related sites that blocking access to them is a lost battle.
And this doesn’t just concern pornographic sites. It can be implemented in a side range of use. It can be used to limit access to social media sites. It can be used to prevent minors to sign up for dating sites. It’s not too long ago an article came out that certain dating sites are frequently used to groom minors. It can restrict features in certain video games, like the online shop.
So many things have changed in the internet over the past 30 years. People used to store passwords in clear text. Financial institutions had no oversight at all. Gambling was available to minors. Issues have been resolved as they become more pressing. And a better age verification system for online services is something that will barely inconvenience most adults but protect a bunch of kids. So in my opinion it would be worthwhile.
Yes it’s not fool proof, yes people will find ways around it, yes sketchy sites will just operate in countries that don’t care. But just because a law and system isn’t perfect doesn’t mean it’s useless.
I’m not really knowledgeable about verification tokens or verificayion algorythms. I don’t know if what you say is possible and secure, as everyone can just copy the “35 years old” token and send it instead of their “14 y o”. But I may be really wrong on this one or missing an important thing.
I’m sure we can figure something out, and I’m sure a secure and private algorythm can exist. But who controls and makes it? Wouldn’t corporations be incentivized to collect data on their users? They can even anonymize it and sell it. It would technically still be private, because it doesn’t have your name on it. But big enough corporations can still assign that information to you. They know that much about you.
I know it’s pessimistic, and I totally understand and even agree with you in that blocking domains isn’t really a good solution. It could work with less technically inclined children, but there will always be a way to circumvent it.
And I also agree that laws and regulations can’t be perfect. There will always be a downside to everything. In this case I’d prefer if they didn’t implement the regulation, but who am I to complain. I just wish there were a better alternative for everyone.