>This system, referred to as “double anonymity”, means the porn site receives only a yes-or-no confirmation that the user is of legal age. The age-check provider knows who the user is, but not which sites they visit.
I don't know the specifics, but seems very reasonable if implemented matches the promise. If it's required also for some non porn sites (social media? gambling maybe), there should be no stigma attached either.
They question the quality of the Zero Knowledge Proofs (something like "it's still new") and raise what I find the more interesting question: "who will be left out?". Not only for porn, that is.
ethbr1 · 1d ago
To the "Who will be left out?" question, mandates like these should come with statutory {must issue} requirements.
Much of the Secure Boot crap could have been avoided if all devices had been required to have a user-accessible mode that trusted a must-issue signer of last resort, and that signer was broadly available.
E.g. LetsEncrypt for devices
If on the one hand we want to improve security via encryption/verfication, then on the other hand we must remove the governments' and corporations' abilities to abuse it.
kennu · 1d ago
At minimum, the government gets a "ping" when identified citizens visit adult sites requiring the age check, so they can keep a record. In worse scenarios, maybe some identifier leaks through that can also identify which site they visited. And of course, the identification apps can be hacked through supply chain attacks etc.
fulafel · 9h ago
Without knowing the specifics, this is not necessarily the case. It could be implemented without needing to ping "the government". As a strawman idea, there could be a monthly refreshed distributed database of booleans per citizen identity and accessed through a keyed hash.
rvnx · 1d ago
There is a very possible attack. Open a porn website, buy ad traffic in France, once users are here, claim identity needs to be verified. In the background, start the process to open a bank account in one of these online banks and act as a relay in the verification process.
ffsm8 · 1d ago
Is that an actual thread model, and or are you just making stuff up?
I'm asking because even oauth would make this kind of attack vector impossible, as the referrer and redirect urls are verified - and I sincerely doubt they're so incompetent not to do something similar in such a context.
rvnx · 23h ago
It is a relay attack.
There are a lot of verification platforms, so the idea is that the user is asked to be verified and that his proof of identity is reused in live for something else.
In the addressbar, user sees "dangerousporn.com" -> "safeidentify.com"
The operator of "dangerousporn.com" starts (manually) an application to a [bank account / crypto exchange "bank.com"], using a fixed residential proxy (Luminati / Oxylabs, etc).
Once a victim arrives on "safeidentify.com", the user that is on "safeidentify.com" is asked to follow the actions that "bank.com" is asking to do (upload your ID, turn head left, turn head right, up, down).
"safeidentify.com" plays back the recorded video on the KYC platform of "bank.com" using an emulated Webcam.
Difficult ? Yes and no, but manually doable on a case-by-case basis, and you don't need thousands of victims as it is really worth.
ffsm8 · 23h ago
to begin with, youve already switched the hacker from an advertiser to the operator running the website.
but ignoring that: none of what youve written there has been enabled by an identity provider hosted by the state. These scams already exists, today and various "special" users fall victim to them.
but lets ignore that too: these verifications are usually done interactively and cannot simply be played back, as you need to actually react to the actions of the person verifying your identiy
but lets ignore that too: its _highly_ unlikely the service will make users upload IDs and get verified via video etc on every connection. I'm gonna bet this is a one-time action, and after that you'll probably have to simply authenticate via 2-3 factors (username, password, biometric, sms, email, e-pass, certificate etc) - so what you're insinuating (this service makes people numb to such situation) is implausible. Especially in the context this scenario is in: merely verifying >18 yo
rvnx · 21h ago
> you need to actually react to the actions of the person verifying your identiy
yes it's exactly the point, use porn websites as a hook to convince the user to do your actions to verify their "identity"
Arnt · 1d ago
Is it financially viable? Do you happen to know roughly how much these services cost?
Because it's easy to say "just use that third-party service" but if the cost of that service is well above the profit margin of a porn site, the site cannot really do it.
palata · 1d ago
I think it could be a government website that gives you an anonymous token. The government checks your age from your identity (some "eID") and gives you a token that is "difficult" for them to track (see e.g. Privacy Pass [1]).
Then you pass this token to your porn website and they can verify that this token means that you have the required age. But the porn website cannot identify you.
Not sure about the price of such a service, but it would be paid by the public.
So, could be a government website, but likely for-profit companies will try to capture it by any means necessary, the very least a lot of lobbying.
Arnt · 19h ago
In theory the government could operate a free service for the benefit of porn companies, but in practice I don't see that as very likely to happen.
palata · 16h ago
> for the benefit of porn companies
Or for the benefit of the children who have a harder time accessing the porn sites, maybe?
Zak · 23h ago
It seems to me a much better way would be to require porn sites to check for an HTTP header that says the user is underage, and to require major consumer OS vendors to implement it.
There are minimal privacy implications; it could also be applied to privacy laws and the like protecting minors; it would be trivial for sites to comply.
At the very least, wouldn't the age verification site know the API caller requesting verification? How else would it send a callback indicating that the user was or was not of legal age?
close04 · 1d ago
> This check must be carried out by an external service, not the porn site itself
> the porn site receives only a yes-or-no confirmation that the user is of legal age
What does the external service receive?
palata · 1d ago
There are cryptographic ways to do that (e.g. [1]), making sure (or at least "difficult") that the external website cannot track you.
If 99% of reason to get verified is to look at porn (and let's be honest, near 100% of those who want to be verified after midnight), then the website doing the actual verification of identities has a list of people looking at porn.
No amount of cryptography can protect against this. Now, if the French government issued tokens preemptively to everyone, that would work, but then it becomes trivial for to copy the tokens.
palata · 4h ago
> If 99% of reason
Sure, if you start with convenient assumptions, it's easy to prove your point :-).
Now let's imagine that people don't need a token for each session but to create an account. Suddenly they are not asking for tokens after midnight, and not repeatedly, right?
Let's push it as far as saying that other websites may need verification, e.g. social media. And for the sake of the argument, let's imagine that there are more than one social media. If the token issuer receives 4 requests from the same person, is it for 4 social media? 2 social media and 2 porn sites? Not so clear anymore.
Finally, let's pair it with an "eID" app. So people get the app to use an electronic ID (which is presumably useful for things that are not porn). Let's say that when you install the app, it gets 5 age tokens for you. You may or may not use them, it just creates them. Now the token issuer sees that everybody gets 5 tokens. Difficult to say that they all need to access 5 porn websites, isn't it?
I don't know if age verification is fundamentally a good thing. But "no amount of cryptography can protect against this"... I don't know.
> that would work, but then it becomes trivial for to copy the tokens.
Anyway it is trivial for a child to ask their parent to give them access to porn. The whole idea is that usually, parents won't do it.
close04 · 1d ago
There are always ways. But I asked what is that external provider actually receiving. Or to put it differently, what is it allowed to receive.
If the law forces down people's throats an intermediary between them and a porn site, then it better also force the intermediary to guarantee anonymity.
palata · 16h ago
> There are always ways.
Hmm...
> But I asked what is that external provider actually receiving.
Sure, I don't know. What I'm saying is that at least it seems possible to make is reasonably private. That's better than if it was impossible, e.g. putting a backdoor in E2EE "only for the good guys". But then I would be contradicting your statement that "there are always ways", so... well.
tyleo · 1d ago
This is a hard situation. I don’t think minors should be exposed to porn. Hell, I think even social media has a drug-like effect best kept from minors.
Age verification is the most obvious solution but comes with the downside of potentially leaking private adult activity or information.
I suppose my POV is that the benefit here outweighs the good even if imperfect. Porn just isn’t a necessity even if some folks really enjoy it.
I don’t hold that POV strongly, I pretty much formed it while writing this comment. I’m be interested in hearing other perspectives.
jeroenhd · 1d ago
> I don’t think minors should be exposed to porn.
The problem with that is that minors will be looking at porn. You're not going to stop a horny 16 year old.
These laws will certainly take care of age gating the decent, well-willing websites. The shady, probably unmonitored, or even niche websites outside of the mainstream, won't.
Aside from the obvious VPN workaround, this will only push curious teenagers towards worse websites.
As for privacy risks, privacy-friendly methods do exist. Yivi (previously dubbed IRMA) is a proof-of-concept that has been running for a while for privacy-friendly verification and data exchange using signed attributes (https://irma.app/docs/what-is-irma/). A signed "user-is-over-18" attribute is all a website would need to verify a user's age, without any other details.
Privacy-friendly age verification won't stop the other risks and problems these law may impose, though.
tyleo · 1d ago
I’m not convinced by the argument. I believe porn use by minors is going up. That means they were impeded in the past more than they are impeded now. I believe age verification was a big part of that: folks were carded to buy Playboys. Sure you could get a fake card, but the barrier to entry was higher and that had an impact.
I also don’t take it as a good argument that, “some people will break the law and therefore there should be no law.” E.g., “decent, well-willing” people pay taxes but, “shady, probably unmonitored,” people don’t. Yet we don’t say, “there shouldn’t be taxes,” on this basis.
diggan · 1d ago
> I believe porn use by minors is going up.
Why do you believe this? I wasn't sure what to believe, and after some casual searches it seems like the percentage who reported ever having used pornography is actually decreasing, but the frequency of viewing pornography has gone up for those who actively view it. But it also seems to differ a lot by country, what I found for Sweden doesn't match what researchers found in Spain, for example, and I'm sure the US would be different too.
It would seem to me like parental controls and supervision of computer/phone use is much higher than when I was growing up. Basically none of our parents understand what this new "interwebs" thing was about today, but every parent today know exactly what it is. None of us kids had any parental controls on our computers AFAIK, but today it seems to be the norm, at least what I can tell from my own circles of acquaintances.
techjamie · 23h ago
> I believe porn use by minors is going up.
In correlation, no doubt, with how many minors have cell phones that can be used anywhere, with a good expectation of privacy. It's not like how it was when I was a kid, where the average kid had access to maybe the family computer or, if they were lucky, a laptop.
> E.g., “decent, well-willing” people pay taxes but, “shady, probably unmonitored,” people don’t. Yet we don’t say, “there shouldn’t be taxes,” on this basis.
The better comparison would be with another vice. I don't particularly care about marijuana, but given the choice, is it better as a society to give people legal, certified, safe weed choices, or should it be relegated to street dealers that might cut their product with other stuff?
vbezhenar · 1d ago
I'd also add that Google is pretty good at filtering out unavailable websites. My country fights windmills by blocking anythink porn-related. And Google with simple "porn" search will remove those blocked websites, but would add millions of yet unblocked mirrors and whatnot, so this block is laughably easy to avoid. It's not like porn is scarce resource available on the selected websites, quite the opposite. I'd guess that French teenagers would just do the same: search "porn", open 100 new tabs, find one that works and close the rest.
ty6853 · 1d ago
>These laws will certainly take care of age gating the decent, well-willing websites
Lol they won't. dark IDs or just AI altering their IDs, the second france enforces such law there will be some entrepreneur that makes an AI bot that accepts your ID and then changes the DOB and then spits out the video/images for KYC.
diggan · 1d ago
Use the national ID that surely has a digital DB, and make the check against those, which unless some corrupt officials has edit rights to, won't allow those simple bypasses.
ty6853 · 1d ago
Assuming they can check EU wide, since france is party to treaties allowing mostly free migration throughout the EU to France and recognizes the authenticity of those EU nation states IDs for commerce and domicile in France.
diggan · 1d ago
Well, the mentioned credit card checks would be applicable regardless of your residency/citizenship, so if you're visiting France and try to browse Pornhub, you'd be required to provide CC details for the verification, is my understanding at least
Or you have a ID issued by France, and you'll use that.
Besides, heavily depends on how the verification services implement their checks. Whenever I (Spanish resident, Swedish citizen) end up having to do verification checks for some EU/Spanish service, they usually have more or less every type of ID I could have been using available.
diggan · 1d ago
> I don’t think minors should be exposed to porn
I guess the devil is in the details. I think you're talking about this from the context of USA, where I think a minor is up to 18, while a minor is up to 15. Then what constitutes of "porn" is also very different, I'm sure pictures of topless women could be considered porn in some places, while not in others.
So by some folks definition, a lot of content on current social media would be considered porn, and by others, a lot of content on porn sites wouldn't be considered porn.
What's lacking in these discussions are almost always: Not being specific enough about used terms and also providing enough context to understand the specifics and where those come from.
williamdclt · 1d ago
Fleeting, largely-unconsidered thought: given teenagers _will_ look for porn, that I can’t reliably be prevented and that some porn is worse than other, could/should we have a category of porn that can be accessed _for teenagers_ (>15yo for example)?
A category where there has to be no violence, no degradation, decent representation of sexualities/races/body types, no incest etc etc…
Basically give enough to teenagers that they’re satisfied enough with it without having to look elsewhere and be exposed to the worse stuff.
Doesn’t sound entirely like a bad idea
oersted · 1d ago
This is a reasonable take, and there is strong precedent that it can work.
In Germany, the drinking age for beer and similar lower alcohol drinks is 16 instead of 18, and it has a big impact in preventing teenagers from binge drinking vodka and such.
In the Netherlands, beer and wine are readily available in every supermarket, but you really need to get out of your way to get harder alcohol at designated dispensaries or liquor stores manned by a clerk.
Similarly, the laws on drugs make a significant distinction between softer drugs like weed (not legalised despite stereotypes, but tolerated) and harder drugs like heroin. There was a massive heroin addiction epidemic in the 70s, and such methods were remarkably effective in combating that.
TheChaplain · 1d ago
IMHO it's not porn that is the problem, it's parents.
What minors are exposed to, and educated about, is the parents primary responsibility to deal with.
Minors will somehow get access to porn and nudies, age verification will not stop them.
TeMPOraL · 1d ago
> What minors are exposed to, and educated about, is the parents primary responsibility to deal with.
Yes and no. We're sharing this responsibility in half with the government, due to public education requirement.
The moment a kid starts attending an educational institution - which can be as early as 1yo (daycare) or 3 yo(kindergarten), and usually no later than 7yo (where mandatory education usually kicks in), the parents lose control over what their kids "are exposed to, and educated about". But the problem isn't the educational institutions either (though they sometimes contribute).
The problem is other kids.
Minors will get access to porn and nudes in their teenage years, and there's fuck parents and teachers can do about it. There's always going to be a kid that somehow gets their hand on this stuff and bring it to the school. It takes just one for it to spread like wildfire.
To those who think a good parent should be able to protect their teens from exposure to porn: first demonstrate how one can stop a preschooler from contracting acute Paw Patrol or Frozen infection within first two weeks of kindergarten, and then we can talk.
slumberlust · 12h ago
Do you feel the same about other guardrails typically aimed at protecting children? Tobacco control, driving licenses, gambling restrictions?
Good parenting combined with societal guardrails lead to the best chance outcomes.
const_cast · 9h ago
IMO these are already controlled on the same level as web access.
The ISP verifies your age when you buy internet access. The clerk verifies your age when you buy wine.
The clerk doesn't follow you home and make sure you don't give your kid wine. And, symmetrically, the ISP doesn't make sure you don't allow your kids access to porn. Once the transaction is done, it's in the parent's hands.
The difference is that parent's aren't very keen to give their kids alcohol... usually. Although it is explicitly legal in a lot of places. But for the internet, they are very keen so it's normalized and nobody cares.
wkat4242 · 1d ago
I'm sure teens of all times have had access to porn. I got it from a home built pay TV decoder in the 90s (sound didn't work but I didn't care so much lol)
And yes extreme types were already thing then too. Bukkake, gangbangs, all my friends in school saw these things. I'm pretty sure most of them have never done those practices in their lives. They're all pretty boring family men now. And they are respectful to women. Society is doing fine.
ty6853 · 1d ago
I don't disagree but let me go one step further and say perhaps it is no one's responsibility. A parent cannot possibly monitor what teens are getting into at all times. When teens do 'bad' things it doesn't mean the parent or society is somehow at fault.
imchillyb · 1d ago
> A parent cannot possibly monitor what teens are getting into at all times.
This is alarmingly incorrect. Extra curricular activities, clubs, sports, and music work exceptionally well at keeping kids too busy to indulge in pornography or other unacceptable habits like drugs.
Idle hands are the devil’s workshop and all that. Busy hands find little trouble.
TeMPOraL · 1d ago
> This is alarmingly incorrect. Extra curricular activities, clubs, sports, and music work exceptionally well at keeping kids too busy to indulge in pornography or other unacceptable habits like drugs.
Ha ha, if only.
You're forgetting the liminal space - the transition periods. Unless you're going to personally hand your kid off to a teacher and then pick them up afterwards, exactly on the minute the activities start and end, leaving exactly zero time for them to interact with other kids with little supervision, kids will find a way.
And if you actually manage to do that, you'll be severely damaging their social development, hindering their ability to function in society as independent adult, possibly for life. This is arguably much, much worse than them smoking a few cigarettes and watching some porn.
loudmax · 1d ago
The amount of exposure matters here. It's one thing for a teenager to manage to occasionally access clandestine pornography (as was kind of the norm growing up in the 1980's). It's a much worse thing to spend many hours per week looking at porn. The former is probably not a terrible thing, the latter is not healthy for emotional or social development.
Plus, there are other positive aspects to keeping kids busy and involved with healthy social activities.
const_cast · 9h ago
But there's probably downsides too. Just anecdotally, I know lot's of locked-down home school type kids who quickly fell into alcoholism and drug-abuse because of their lifestyle. When you get nothing, and then get a lot of access, some people go crazy.
Yes, it would be nice if every little kid can be a nice altar boy who plays football and reads under the tree. But let's be realistic - making mistakes is part of life, and it's really the part of life that allows us to figure out who we are.
dns_snek · 1d ago
You're forgetting that even if you somehow managed to keep your kid on a leash so short that they never had a chance of coming in contact with porn, they'll probably grow up with life-long psychological and relationship problems that will be many orders of magnitude worse than any hypothetical harm you protected them from.
tyleo · 1d ago
I’m not convinced. Illicit content is more accessible to everyone than ever before. I question the efficacy of mounting ever increasing pressure on parents to police their kids. At some points we need to help shoulder the burden as a society and I think this is one of those points.
I see similar arguments for food, drugs, safety, social media, etc. Patents aren’t super heros with infinite time to purify across all these dimensions.
oersted · 1d ago
I don't disagree, but let's not forget that there is a significant difference with main things that are age-gated right now: alcohol, tobacco, driving...
It's not just about addiction or mental health, it's a whole different ballgame. These things carry big real-world physical risks, potentially deadly. Minors literally have different brain chemistries as they develop, and drugs can cause long-lasting effects unlike in adults.
Even gambling is not age-gated as strictly, with massive potential negative impacts to your livelyhood.
For the rest of things that might cause some psychological harm (maybe, hard to verify), like movies or videogames, we just have recommendations and some light barriers. Elevating porn to the top category is therefore quite a significant move, it is not the same.
No comments yet
Retric · 1d ago
I think porn has ~net neural effects on kids. One of the upsides is it’s a time sink replacing activities that can result in direct physical harm, just as video games do etc.
Without hormones driving people to it it’s uninteresting. After hormones kick in there’s upsides and downsides to porn, but those hormones are pushing a drug like effect and thus addiction either way.
closewith · 1d ago
> One of the upsides is it’s a time sink replacing activities that can result in direct physical harm, just as video games do etc.
This is a delusional worldview.
episteme · 23h ago
I think they might have meant that video games are also a time sink, not that video games cause harm?
closewith · 22h ago
It's delusional to believe that porn and video games using the time that could otherwise be spent on any number of better and healthier actions is a good think.
Retric · 22h ago
Reality works on what is, “could be” is your delusion here.
closewith · 22h ago
Almost anything else a ten year old will plausibly get up to, even sedentarily, will be better than pornography.
Retric · 21h ago
Many things a 10 year old get up to have significantly higher risks of death.
Banning pornography nationwide, limiting video game time etc, therefore inevitably results in kids dying. So you need to demonstrate the benefits outweigh that tangible harm.
closewith · 20h ago
Is your argument that pornography has a lower risk than the median activity of a child?
If so, you are deluded and quite honestly disturbed. I mean this with pity, you should seek counselling.
const_cast · 9h ago
I think the implication here is that horny teenagers are going to do horny teenager things. So it's not fair to compare porn to just any activity, we have to compare it to things like teen pregnancy. Which is WAY down, by the way.
Retric · 20h ago
> median activity of a child?
Mean, the median is irrelevant here for hopefully obvious reasons.
> you are deluded
You keep saying that word, but facts are facts. If your argument is it’s better for more kids to die, that’s fucked up. Alternatively you could be ignoring reality, but there’s no third option here.
closewith · 19h ago
Right — and the facts are that early porn exposure is linked to earlier sex, riskier behaviours, body shame, and higher odds of aggression and coercion, especially when the content is violent. That’s not some moral panic — that’s the current consensus of peer-reviewed studies, UNICEF, and public health bodies. Believing otherwise in the face of that evidence isn’t rational scepticism, it’s delusion. You need to stop pretending kids watching Pornhub is harmless — it isn’t.
Retric · 18h ago
Everything has some level of harm, the issue here is comparing relative vs absolute harm. Pointing out a positive doesn’t invalidate other harms, but finding the net effect requires everything to be considered.
Also, there’s significant questions around porn and early sexual activity with evidence in both directions. Unsurprisingly, people be complicated.
Just as an example the “explosion” of access to internet porn would, if the often stated theory of significant impact be correct, presumably have had population level impacts on when people first had sex but 1997 to 2007 showed ~zero changes. “The proportion of high school students who were sexually active has remained steady since 1997” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3064497/
Obviously being a survey the data is suspect but it is still a meaningful datapoint here. Political arguments don’t need to consist with reality but science does.
thunderfork · 1d ago
This is not a very constructive comment. Explain how?
CalRobert · 1d ago
I generally agree, except that I don’t like how this removes anonymity. (I also think fifteen year olds seeing genitalia isn’t a big deal but it does seem some porn can have negative impacts) The government shouldn’t need to know if I read hustler magazine but online I don’t know how to separate proof of age from identity.
orwin · 22h ago
All the code produced by this government agency it required to be open source, so unless you see a token tracker on GitHub, anonymity should be fine.
resource_waste · 1d ago
While I don't think there is much harm, 'If you stare into the abyss, the abyss will stare back at you.'
You cannot be unaffected by events.
(I know the quote is paraphrased, and specifically talking about philosophy)
CalRobert · 1d ago
Yeah, big difference between seeing consenting adults have sex and some more violent stuff
SecretDreams · 1d ago
> Hell, I think even social media has a drug-like effect best kept from minors.
I'd venture to guess the exposure to social media is far more harmful than porn, but I could be out to lunch as to how much kids are looking at porn??
UnreachableCode · 1d ago
>Instead, users must verify their age using a credit card or a government-issued ID. This check must be carried out by an external service, not the porn site itself.
>This system, referred to as “double anonymity”, means the porn site receives only a yes-or-no confirmation that the user is of legal age. The age-check provider knows who the user is, but not which sites they visit.
So is there an issue here if the external service disposes of the card details immediately following confirmation? I'm not exactly sure how this would/could work though.
numpad0 · 1d ago
> Porn just isn’t a necessity even if some folks really enjoy it.
So isn't speech! Not everyone need privileges to talk about human rights or democracy. China's doing fine with neither(officially).
By the way, unofficially and anecdotally, coastal Chinese prostitution as well as porn seem to be getting bigger and more wicked faster. I wonder which comes first: puritanism, or erosion of industrial base. This whole slow movement could be just a symptom than culprit.
theshrike79 · 8h ago
The problem is that the legit sites will implement this. These sites have actual takedown processes and they verify uploaders (to a degree) etc.
The ones that don't ... will have the nasty stuff.
mediumrhino · 1d ago
Counter argument: While I agree with your general sentiment, this will only take effect on larger sites and will lead to minors shifting to smaller, less moderated, and potentially more extreme content.
MangoToupe · 1d ago
> Age verification is the most obvious solution but comes with the downside of potentially leaking private adult activity or information.
Honestly the older I get, the less I can strongly care about this. For better or worse, porn is a relatively mainstream topic. If we can't have discussions about why porn taste is so potentially devastating to leak, we don't deserve privacy.
Besides, it's not like "leaking" of this information would lead to a public index of who is watching what. And maybe it should, I'm no longer sure.
badmintonbaseba · 1d ago
I wonder how effectively the regulation achieves its desired outcome of fewer minors being exposed to porn.
robertlagrant · 1d ago
> Age verification is the most obvious solution but comes with the downside of potentially leaking private adult activity or information.
The system they have seems reasonable, though? Verifier doesn't know site; site doesn't know user. Not going to be perfect, but is quite good.
const_cast · 9h ago
Minors already aren't allowed to look at porn, and in fact they're not even allowed to access the internet.
I mean, when you go to an ISP to purchase an internet plan, they're going to ask you for ID and they're going to verify your age. It is then the parents responsibility to monitor that. If parents choose to turn around and grant their kids free access, then fair's fair.
Just think about alcohol and tobacco. The clerk is going to ask for your ID in the store, sure. But they're not gonna follow you home and make sure you don't slip your kid a cig or a bottle. That's not their responsibility, their transaction is done. And, actually, in a lot of places this is explicitly allowed. I think in most US states minors can drink under adult supervision.
So, if we want to solve this, we need to aim at the parents and convincing them (as well as giving them more tools) to do this reasonably. These identity solutions are a tool, but IMO, a rather blunt and unnecessary tool.
wkat4242 · 1d ago
I love the way you use the term POV so much. I see what you're doing there ;)
fbn79 · 1d ago
How much time do you think will take for teenagers to discover VPNs? Another impossible to enforce law made by people who don't know what they're doing.
ty6853 · 1d ago
I wonder if France has 'strict liability' like the US, where it doesn't matter one iota for minor sex crimes that they had a passport, DL and their own mother claiming they are 18 and you did all the due diligence in the world, if they were all lying and the documentation is a perfect fake or even just incorrect it is zero defense and straight to jail.
Zak · 23h ago
This is a misunderstanding of US law.
Most criminal laws are state laws, so you'll find at least[0] 50 different versions of any given crime. In some states, there is strict liability for an adult having sex with a minor (usually called something like sexual abuse of a minor; formerly often called statutory rape). In other states, the examples you gave would be valid defenses[1].
Laws requiring age verification have their own intent requirements. The Texas age verification law only applies when sites "knowingly and intentionally" distribute pornography[2] and imposes civil liability for sites that do so and fail to require either "digital identification" or use a commercial age verification service. There doesn't seem to be any specific requirement that they not make mistakes; it would probably default to negligence if it ended up in court.
[0] Some US territory is not inside any state, and there are federal laws that come into play when an act crosses state lines.
Cody wilson was convicted in Texas after an age verification online service verified a sugar daddy escort was 18. The ID turned out to be fake, he was arrested, charged, and found guilty although I think he got 10 years probation with some sort of arrangement to expunge the offense if he completes probation.
IIRC the state of Texas was pushing for much worse, but basically the 'victim' was going to end up getting dragged through the mud and probably be forced to admit to all sorts of fraud and felonies involved in forgery, fraud secondary to forgery, and whatever other crimes are involved when you engage in crime with falsified government ID etc so they settled to avoid her having to testify.
Zak · 23h ago
Texas appears to have strict liability for that specific offense, which differs from how its porn age verification law is structured, and also differs from equivalent offenses in some other states.
diggan · 1d ago
If you give them a reason: Yesterday
If there is no need: Never
rvnx · 1d ago
Only if sanctions are too weak.
closewith · 1d ago
But it will stop many children who don't have the ability to install a VPN on their locked down Android or iOS device. This specific French law is a response to research that showed that 20% of French 10-year-olds access porn monthly, which caused a national scandal.
It can also force pressure on the sites to more carefully filter minors to both avoid other jurisdictions following suite and criminal charges if continuing access to found to be granted French children.
> Another impossible to enforce law made by people who don't know what they're doing.
A law doesn't have to be 100% inescapable to be effective. In fact, this is an extremely enforceable law, and it is you who fail to see the application, either through ignorance or arrogance.
miohtama · 1d ago
You do not need stop VPN or have age verification websites. You can just lock down Android/iOS/Edge against a blacklist of porn sites. Many providers are selling this as a service.
But it would be up to the parents to do this.
closewith · 1d ago
You can say the same thing about alcohol, nicotine, driving, etc. As a society, we can decide that you cannot provide certain products and services to children and we can make that provision a crime.
robertlagrant · 1d ago
> Pornhub’s internal data from 2024 shows France is its second-largest market after the United States.
Wow - that is crazy for a country a 5th the population of the US.
> In this section we dive deeper into the Top 20 Countries by order of highest traffic.
With France ranked #2, which makes it seem like it's total traffic, not per capita.
wkat4242 · 1d ago
Here in Europe porn is not really viewed as this deeply shameful thing it is in the US. It's something regular people enjoy and not just men.
robertlagrant · 1h ago
Germany has 30% more people than France. Germany is in Europe. It's still surprising, if you believe the "Europe is homogenous" thing you're espousing.
zamadatix · 1d ago
We recently added a similar law in the US state I'm in. I'm (obviously) an adult who could just do the verification but just go to other sites instead. If that's me now I can't imagine how little of a shit 16 year old me would have given.
I'm not a fan of these types of laws in the first place but, if we're going to have them, punishing distribution but not consumption will do nothing. On the other hand punishing consumption via law is just silly enough to most people (for now at least) that we end up with this law which only makes it inconvenient for adults to access porn.
palata · 1d ago
> punishing distribution but not consumption will do nothing
I'm not so sure. Say you want to prevent children from accessing social media. Would you fine a child for that? Put them in jail?
On the other hand, it's pretty easy to ask Meta to verify the age. There are not a gazillion social medias out there: force them all to verify the age, and most children won't have access to them anymore.
zamadatix · 1d ago
As already stated, fining a child or sending them to jail for viewing porn would be silly. The point was, lacking the willingness to do that, having commercially operated porn sites verify ages does not actually prevent or disincentivize children from accessing porn. A good intent does not itself make a law effective, it has to be something you're willing to incentivise compliance with from those who'd be breaking it and children are not going to stop viewing porn because pornhub.com (or any other website) won't let them without a verification check.
The comparison to social media is a bit rough because the laws and focus there are around preventing children from creating accounts where their data is mined to be sold, the feeds are tailored to them, and their identities are publicly shared. The same laws do not actually attempt to prevent children without an account from viewing vacation photos. What applies in preventing account creation for social media does not necessarily apply to preventing content consumption itself in other cases.
palata · 16h ago
I agree, but in your comment above it sounded to me that it was a general statement about "the kind of laws that want to check the age".
I don't have a definitive opinion on Zero Knowledge Proof for social media access, but it seems like it may make it harder for children to access social media (the EFF is not really into those ZKPs, so apparently there are downsides too).
Bender · 1d ago
Age verification sites were never required. This is a new artificially created business model. There is no need for age verification on the server side. Parents of small children can handle it assuming minor changes or reverts to devices and some apps to look for the RTA header. The server or CDN need only let the client know it may contain adult and / or user generated content via one simple header. [1]
Not perfect, nothing ever is nor ever will be. Also never try to block teens, that is a foolish losing battle.
Do they expect porn sites with revenge porn, pirated content to suddenly be implementing national ID age checks? Or do we expect these websites not implement the ID checks, making them easier to access by the kids?
ghm2180 · 1d ago
Double anonymity seems as a great means for enforcing privacy in general for any data you generate taht you don't want other people to see.
Like in a location app on your phone generating (Lat Long) pairs. The app developer could just provide an inference engine running on a 3p trusted server to which an app developer has write only rights, e.g. a retrieval engine based on location — but cannot read. The user's app has read only rights — say get map tiles based on location.
Its just that this is not the universe we live in sadly...(Maybe the EU will become that)
Ekaros · 1d ago
It will probably slow some.
But well distributing material via sneakernet is entirely possible and relatively cheap and easy. So after certain age they will get their hands on it.
And well, most will go to some other place that does not follow regulations. There is plenty of them and more will pop up.
UnreachableCode · 1d ago
I'm thinking for many less savvy websites, a VPN will get around this instantly?
Just make it illegal to serve the stuff to minors, and start supplying heavy fines when done so.
Let the industry be innovative and find solutions themselves to stay compliant.
It is not regulators responsibility to solve problems.
brookst · 1d ago
Not a fan of selective enforcement. We all know there is no way to prevent a technically savvy 17 year old from accessing porn. And “everyone’s breaking the law, we’ll decide who to prosecute based on who they are” is a terrible way to regulate.
tsimionescu · 1d ago
That is very much the opposite of good governance. Instituting mandates with no rules for how to comply with them leaves the door open to abuse on all sides.
For example, a malicious inspector could open the site and pass any verifications in place while a minor is in the room, notice that the site did not prevent the minor from seeing the content, and fine the site.
Conversely, the site could claim they have found some fancy data analysis method to prevent access to minors in the wild while simply implementing some "we believe you are minor" page to be randomly generated once in a while, and claim in court that they have done their best and at most a small handful of children are getting around their complex protections.
tossandthrow · 1d ago
That is not correct.
In law making the is a concept of standards VS. Rules - look it up.
"you can not serve explicit erotica material to people under the age of 18" is very much a rule. It is super easy to asses whether you do it.
The law should not mandate how to comply.
Law makers do not care if you refrain from pressing the speeder or drive an under powered car.
iknowstuff · 1d ago
Idk dude haven’t we all watched it since age 13 ish and turned out fine?
tossandthrow · 1d ago
Given the massive levels of low libido, erectile dysfunction, reduced birth rates, anxiety, depression etc. I don't think it is fair to says that people turns out fine.
The question is what role porn has.
Regardless, my comment was more aimed at how we regulate than the effects of porn.
dns_snek · 1d ago
We shouldn't be discussing how to most effectively infringe upon people's personal liberties before first discussing whether there's one iota of evidence that these liberties are to blame for extremely serious issues you mentioned. The root cause of these problems is almost certainly a lot closer to the general state of economic and social hardship than porn.
Of course it's a lot easier for those in power to divert attention to a moral panic like porn instead of acknowledging that our economic system and core values are making people depressed and hopeless to the point that they're becoming incapable of performing the one thing they've been optimizing for over millions of years of evolution - reproducing.
tossandthrow · 1d ago
Absolutely no doubt!
Something indicates that the feeling of equality (which most easily can be achieved with actual equality) would be more beneficial.
But then again, this would likely require taxing - something in particular Americans loathe for some reason (hint: decades of aggressive propaganda)
brookst · 1d ago
You’re making some huge leaps in assuming the direction of causality.
tossandthrow · 1d ago
Where?
I explicitly mention that I do not assume this is related to porn.
I merely say that we did not turn out fine.
conartist6 · 1d ago
I mean I imagine people would also feel all that if you burned their house down, and with the modern heat waves we should expect a lot more houses to burn in the coming years.
tossandthrow · 1d ago
So I reckon the right answer to houses being burnt down is not "but we turned out just fine"?
theoreticalmal · 1d ago
No. No we have not turned out fine
iknowstuff · 1d ago
???
meepmorp · 1d ago
not a comment on you specifically but - ime - when someone says they turned out fine, it's a strong signal that they didn't
ShrootBuck · 1d ago
I actually really like this idea of letting regulators dictate the "what" instead of the "how"
rvnx · 1d ago
More simple (because not on a case-by-case basis): put a blanket ban on porn online, and create rooms where you can watch porn (like in Japan: ビデオボックス), and these rooms should verify identity and age. This will also prevent people from watching porn at work, while strolling at the park, in the queue at the supermarket or while driving a Tesla.
Basically a cleaner society.
ajuc · 1d ago
> Instead, users must verify their age using a credit card or a government-issued ID. This check must be carried out by an external service, not the porn site itself.
> This system, referred to as “double anonymity”, means the porn site receives only a yes-or-no confirmation that the user is of legal age. The age-check provider knows who the user is, but not which sites they visit.
Seems like a reasonable solution.
The only remainig problem (provider knowing that you watch some porn even if not - exactly what kind) could be solved by requiring some other websites to verify age too. For example horror movies or liveleak videos.
david-gpu · 1d ago
I don't understand the logic of preventing minors from watching porn specifically, when they can easily find videos of people being beheaded, blown to bits, burned alive, etc.
I have never had flashbacks from watching porn, but there are things I saw, even on broadcast TV, that still send shivers down my spine.
I am disappointed to see fellow Europeans developing American-style "sex is bad, violence is entertaining" social customs.
closewith · 1d ago
> I am disappointed to see fellow Europeans developing American-style "sex is bad, violence is entertaining" social customs.
Article 227-24 also covers violent videos of that ilk.
david-gpu · 1d ago
Thank you for providing information that I had not seen reported elsewhere. A quick look at the actual law confirms what you said.
I still would not lump pornography with gore and promotion of terrorism, but it is an improvement.
tharmas · 23h ago
Shouldn't the issue with porn be the people in those films are heavily exploited and most often abused and in some cases even worse. In particular women.
Why the absolute focus on demand side and none on the supply side?
I guess the issue is they just want to stop young people from seeing porn? That's it? That's all society is concerned about, regarding porn?
9283409232 · 1d ago
I don't like that we are creating a society that removes accountability from parents. I do think parents are outgunned by tech companies but I also believe that parents have relinquished a lot of their responsibility in making sure their kids are not just doing whatever online.
DataDaemon · 1d ago
No Fap Challenge in France!
porridgeraisin · 1d ago
A credit card, or some money related government ID is what should be used for checking. If you make a separate ID for this, or use something "not risky to hand out", you'll just be creating a business opportunity for adults selling "verification services" using their government ID, for other (potentially) kids to make use of.
If you verify using say, bank credentials, though, then those adults can't do the same since they risk losing money. Minimum balance checks are also necessary so it's not a "nothing to lose" situation.
Important to set incentives right when doing bans like this. Historically, it's been implemented very badly wherever it's been tried.
Of course an outright ban is also not a problem IMO, but many differ on that.
goda90 · 1d ago
A credit card means 0 privacy protection though. The website and the payment processor know exactly who you are and what you are doing.
diggan · 1d ago
> The website and the payment processor know exactly who you are and what you are doing
As far as I understand, the implementation would let the porn website verify you're above 18, and the payment processor would only know that you interacted with a age verification service to verify your age, but not specifically what website is asking you to verify your age. That would seem good enough in terms of privacy, unless I'm missing something?
I don't know the specifics, but seems very reasonable if implemented matches the promise. If it's required also for some non porn sites (social media? gambling maybe), there should be no stigma attached either.
They question the quality of the Zero Knowledge Proofs (something like "it's still new") and raise what I find the more interesting question: "who will be left out?". Not only for porn, that is.
Much of the Secure Boot crap could have been avoided if all devices had been required to have a user-accessible mode that trusted a must-issue signer of last resort, and that signer was broadly available.
E.g. LetsEncrypt for devices
If on the one hand we want to improve security via encryption/verfication, then on the other hand we must remove the governments' and corporations' abilities to abuse it.
I'm asking because even oauth would make this kind of attack vector impossible, as the referrer and redirect urls are verified - and I sincerely doubt they're so incompetent not to do something similar in such a context.
There are a lot of verification platforms, so the idea is that the user is asked to be verified and that his proof of identity is reused in live for something else. In the addressbar, user sees "dangerousporn.com" -> "safeidentify.com"
The operator of "dangerousporn.com" starts (manually) an application to a [bank account / crypto exchange "bank.com"], using a fixed residential proxy (Luminati / Oxylabs, etc).
Once a victim arrives on "safeidentify.com", the user that is on "safeidentify.com" is asked to follow the actions that "bank.com" is asking to do (upload your ID, turn head left, turn head right, up, down).
"safeidentify.com" plays back the recorded video on the KYC platform of "bank.com" using an emulated Webcam.
Difficult ? Yes and no, but manually doable on a case-by-case basis, and you don't need thousands of victims as it is really worth.
but ignoring that: none of what youve written there has been enabled by an identity provider hosted by the state. These scams already exists, today and various "special" users fall victim to them.
but lets ignore that too: these verifications are usually done interactively and cannot simply be played back, as you need to actually react to the actions of the person verifying your identiy
but lets ignore that too: its _highly_ unlikely the service will make users upload IDs and get verified via video etc on every connection. I'm gonna bet this is a one-time action, and after that you'll probably have to simply authenticate via 2-3 factors (username, password, biometric, sms, email, e-pass, certificate etc) - so what you're insinuating (this service makes people numb to such situation) is implausible. Especially in the context this scenario is in: merely verifying >18 yo
yes it's exactly the point, use porn websites as a hook to convince the user to do your actions to verify their "identity"
Because it's easy to say "just use that third-party service" but if the cost of that service is well above the profit margin of a porn site, the site cannot really do it.
Then you pass this token to your porn website and they can verify that this token means that you have the required age. But the porn website cannot identify you.
Not sure about the price of such a service, but it would be paid by the public.
[1]: https://privacypass.github.io
> Use an age verification provider that is legally and technically independent of any online platform hosting or providing porn content - https://www.yoti.com/blog/france-age-verification-law-adult-...
So, could be a government website, but likely for-profit companies will try to capture it by any means necessary, the very least a lot of lobbying.
Or for the benefit of the children who have a harder time accessing the porn sites, maybe?
There are minimal privacy implications; it could also be applied to privacy laws and the like protecting minors; it would be trivial for sites to comply.
> the porn site receives only a yes-or-no confirmation that the user is of legal age
What does the external service receive?
[1]: https://privacypass.github.io
No amount of cryptography can protect against this. Now, if the French government issued tokens preemptively to everyone, that would work, but then it becomes trivial for to copy the tokens.
Sure, if you start with convenient assumptions, it's easy to prove your point :-).
Now let's imagine that people don't need a token for each session but to create an account. Suddenly they are not asking for tokens after midnight, and not repeatedly, right?
Let's push it as far as saying that other websites may need verification, e.g. social media. And for the sake of the argument, let's imagine that there are more than one social media. If the token issuer receives 4 requests from the same person, is it for 4 social media? 2 social media and 2 porn sites? Not so clear anymore.
Finally, let's pair it with an "eID" app. So people get the app to use an electronic ID (which is presumably useful for things that are not porn). Let's say that when you install the app, it gets 5 age tokens for you. You may or may not use them, it just creates them. Now the token issuer sees that everybody gets 5 tokens. Difficult to say that they all need to access 5 porn websites, isn't it?
I don't know if age verification is fundamentally a good thing. But "no amount of cryptography can protect against this"... I don't know.
> that would work, but then it becomes trivial for to copy the tokens.
Anyway it is trivial for a child to ask their parent to give them access to porn. The whole idea is that usually, parents won't do it.
If the law forces down people's throats an intermediary between them and a porn site, then it better also force the intermediary to guarantee anonymity.
Hmm...
> But I asked what is that external provider actually receiving.
Sure, I don't know. What I'm saying is that at least it seems possible to make is reasonably private. That's better than if it was impossible, e.g. putting a backdoor in E2EE "only for the good guys". But then I would be contradicting your statement that "there are always ways", so... well.
Age verification is the most obvious solution but comes with the downside of potentially leaking private adult activity or information.
I suppose my POV is that the benefit here outweighs the good even if imperfect. Porn just isn’t a necessity even if some folks really enjoy it.
I don’t hold that POV strongly, I pretty much formed it while writing this comment. I’m be interested in hearing other perspectives.
The problem with that is that minors will be looking at porn. You're not going to stop a horny 16 year old.
These laws will certainly take care of age gating the decent, well-willing websites. The shady, probably unmonitored, or even niche websites outside of the mainstream, won't.
Aside from the obvious VPN workaround, this will only push curious teenagers towards worse websites.
As for privacy risks, privacy-friendly methods do exist. Yivi (previously dubbed IRMA) is a proof-of-concept that has been running for a while for privacy-friendly verification and data exchange using signed attributes (https://irma.app/docs/what-is-irma/). A signed "user-is-over-18" attribute is all a website would need to verify a user's age, without any other details.
Privacy-friendly age verification won't stop the other risks and problems these law may impose, though.
I also don’t take it as a good argument that, “some people will break the law and therefore there should be no law.” E.g., “decent, well-willing” people pay taxes but, “shady, probably unmonitored,” people don’t. Yet we don’t say, “there shouldn’t be taxes,” on this basis.
Why do you believe this? I wasn't sure what to believe, and after some casual searches it seems like the percentage who reported ever having used pornography is actually decreasing, but the frequency of viewing pornography has gone up for those who actively view it. But it also seems to differ a lot by country, what I found for Sweden doesn't match what researchers found in Spain, for example, and I'm sure the US would be different too.
It would seem to me like parental controls and supervision of computer/phone use is much higher than when I was growing up. Basically none of our parents understand what this new "interwebs" thing was about today, but every parent today know exactly what it is. None of us kids had any parental controls on our computers AFAIK, but today it seems to be the norm, at least what I can tell from my own circles of acquaintances.
In correlation, no doubt, with how many minors have cell phones that can be used anywhere, with a good expectation of privacy. It's not like how it was when I was a kid, where the average kid had access to maybe the family computer or, if they were lucky, a laptop.
> E.g., “decent, well-willing” people pay taxes but, “shady, probably unmonitored,” people don’t. Yet we don’t say, “there shouldn’t be taxes,” on this basis.
The better comparison would be with another vice. I don't particularly care about marijuana, but given the choice, is it better as a society to give people legal, certified, safe weed choices, or should it be relegated to street dealers that might cut their product with other stuff?
Lol they won't. dark IDs or just AI altering their IDs, the second france enforces such law there will be some entrepreneur that makes an AI bot that accepts your ID and then changes the DOB and then spits out the video/images for KYC.
Or you have a ID issued by France, and you'll use that.
Besides, heavily depends on how the verification services implement their checks. Whenever I (Spanish resident, Swedish citizen) end up having to do verification checks for some EU/Spanish service, they usually have more or less every type of ID I could have been using available.
I guess the devil is in the details. I think you're talking about this from the context of USA, where I think a minor is up to 18, while a minor is up to 15. Then what constitutes of "porn" is also very different, I'm sure pictures of topless women could be considered porn in some places, while not in others.
So by some folks definition, a lot of content on current social media would be considered porn, and by others, a lot of content on porn sites wouldn't be considered porn.
What's lacking in these discussions are almost always: Not being specific enough about used terms and also providing enough context to understand the specifics and where those come from.
A category where there has to be no violence, no degradation, decent representation of sexualities/races/body types, no incest etc etc…
Basically give enough to teenagers that they’re satisfied enough with it without having to look elsewhere and be exposed to the worse stuff.
Doesn’t sound entirely like a bad idea
In Germany, the drinking age for beer and similar lower alcohol drinks is 16 instead of 18, and it has a big impact in preventing teenagers from binge drinking vodka and such.
In the Netherlands, beer and wine are readily available in every supermarket, but you really need to get out of your way to get harder alcohol at designated dispensaries or liquor stores manned by a clerk.
Similarly, the laws on drugs make a significant distinction between softer drugs like weed (not legalised despite stereotypes, but tolerated) and harder drugs like heroin. There was a massive heroin addiction epidemic in the 70s, and such methods were remarkably effective in combating that.
What minors are exposed to, and educated about, is the parents primary responsibility to deal with.
Minors will somehow get access to porn and nudies, age verification will not stop them.
Yes and no. We're sharing this responsibility in half with the government, due to public education requirement.
The moment a kid starts attending an educational institution - which can be as early as 1yo (daycare) or 3 yo(kindergarten), and usually no later than 7yo (where mandatory education usually kicks in), the parents lose control over what their kids "are exposed to, and educated about". But the problem isn't the educational institutions either (though they sometimes contribute).
The problem is other kids.
Minors will get access to porn and nudes in their teenage years, and there's fuck parents and teachers can do about it. There's always going to be a kid that somehow gets their hand on this stuff and bring it to the school. It takes just one for it to spread like wildfire.
To those who think a good parent should be able to protect their teens from exposure to porn: first demonstrate how one can stop a preschooler from contracting acute Paw Patrol or Frozen infection within first two weeks of kindergarten, and then we can talk.
Good parenting combined with societal guardrails lead to the best chance outcomes.
The ISP verifies your age when you buy internet access. The clerk verifies your age when you buy wine.
The clerk doesn't follow you home and make sure you don't give your kid wine. And, symmetrically, the ISP doesn't make sure you don't allow your kids access to porn. Once the transaction is done, it's in the parent's hands.
The difference is that parent's aren't very keen to give their kids alcohol... usually. Although it is explicitly legal in a lot of places. But for the internet, they are very keen so it's normalized and nobody cares.
And yes extreme types were already thing then too. Bukkake, gangbangs, all my friends in school saw these things. I'm pretty sure most of them have never done those practices in their lives. They're all pretty boring family men now. And they are respectful to women. Society is doing fine.
This is alarmingly incorrect. Extra curricular activities, clubs, sports, and music work exceptionally well at keeping kids too busy to indulge in pornography or other unacceptable habits like drugs.
Idle hands are the devil’s workshop and all that. Busy hands find little trouble.
Ha ha, if only.
You're forgetting the liminal space - the transition periods. Unless you're going to personally hand your kid off to a teacher and then pick them up afterwards, exactly on the minute the activities start and end, leaving exactly zero time for them to interact with other kids with little supervision, kids will find a way.
And if you actually manage to do that, you'll be severely damaging their social development, hindering their ability to function in society as independent adult, possibly for life. This is arguably much, much worse than them smoking a few cigarettes and watching some porn.
Plus, there are other positive aspects to keeping kids busy and involved with healthy social activities.
Yes, it would be nice if every little kid can be a nice altar boy who plays football and reads under the tree. But let's be realistic - making mistakes is part of life, and it's really the part of life that allows us to figure out who we are.
I see similar arguments for food, drugs, safety, social media, etc. Patents aren’t super heros with infinite time to purify across all these dimensions.
It's not just about addiction or mental health, it's a whole different ballgame. These things carry big real-world physical risks, potentially deadly. Minors literally have different brain chemistries as they develop, and drugs can cause long-lasting effects unlike in adults.
Even gambling is not age-gated as strictly, with massive potential negative impacts to your livelyhood.
For the rest of things that might cause some psychological harm (maybe, hard to verify), like movies or videogames, we just have recommendations and some light barriers. Elevating porn to the top category is therefore quite a significant move, it is not the same.
No comments yet
Without hormones driving people to it it’s uninteresting. After hormones kick in there’s upsides and downsides to porn, but those hormones are pushing a drug like effect and thus addiction either way.
This is a delusional worldview.
Banning pornography nationwide, limiting video game time etc, therefore inevitably results in kids dying. So you need to demonstrate the benefits outweigh that tangible harm.
If so, you are deluded and quite honestly disturbed. I mean this with pity, you should seek counselling.
Mean, the median is irrelevant here for hopefully obvious reasons.
> you are deluded
You keep saying that word, but facts are facts. If your argument is it’s better for more kids to die, that’s fucked up. Alternatively you could be ignoring reality, but there’s no third option here.
Also, there’s significant questions around porn and early sexual activity with evidence in both directions. Unsurprisingly, people be complicated.
Just as an example the “explosion” of access to internet porn would, if the often stated theory of significant impact be correct, presumably have had population level impacts on when people first had sex but 1997 to 2007 showed ~zero changes. “The proportion of high school students who were sexually active has remained steady since 1997” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3064497/
Obviously being a survey the data is suspect but it is still a meaningful datapoint here. Political arguments don’t need to consist with reality but science does.
You cannot be unaffected by events.
(I know the quote is paraphrased, and specifically talking about philosophy)
I'd venture to guess the exposure to social media is far more harmful than porn, but I could be out to lunch as to how much kids are looking at porn??
>This system, referred to as “double anonymity”, means the porn site receives only a yes-or-no confirmation that the user is of legal age. The age-check provider knows who the user is, but not which sites they visit.
So is there an issue here if the external service disposes of the card details immediately following confirmation? I'm not exactly sure how this would/could work though.
So isn't speech! Not everyone need privileges to talk about human rights or democracy. China's doing fine with neither(officially).
By the way, unofficially and anecdotally, coastal Chinese prostitution as well as porn seem to be getting bigger and more wicked faster. I wonder which comes first: puritanism, or erosion of industrial base. This whole slow movement could be just a symptom than culprit.
The ones that don't ... will have the nasty stuff.
Honestly the older I get, the less I can strongly care about this. For better or worse, porn is a relatively mainstream topic. If we can't have discussions about why porn taste is so potentially devastating to leak, we don't deserve privacy.
Besides, it's not like "leaking" of this information would lead to a public index of who is watching what. And maybe it should, I'm no longer sure.
The system they have seems reasonable, though? Verifier doesn't know site; site doesn't know user. Not going to be perfect, but is quite good.
I mean, when you go to an ISP to purchase an internet plan, they're going to ask you for ID and they're going to verify your age. It is then the parents responsibility to monitor that. If parents choose to turn around and grant their kids free access, then fair's fair.
Just think about alcohol and tobacco. The clerk is going to ask for your ID in the store, sure. But they're not gonna follow you home and make sure you don't slip your kid a cig or a bottle. That's not their responsibility, their transaction is done. And, actually, in a lot of places this is explicitly allowed. I think in most US states minors can drink under adult supervision.
So, if we want to solve this, we need to aim at the parents and convincing them (as well as giving them more tools) to do this reasonably. These identity solutions are a tool, but IMO, a rather blunt and unnecessary tool.
Most criminal laws are state laws, so you'll find at least[0] 50 different versions of any given crime. In some states, there is strict liability for an adult having sex with a minor (usually called something like sexual abuse of a minor; formerly often called statutory rape). In other states, the examples you gave would be valid defenses[1].
Laws requiring age verification have their own intent requirements. The Texas age verification law only applies when sites "knowingly and intentionally" distribute pornography[2] and imposes civil liability for sites that do so and fail to require either "digital identification" or use a commercial age verification service. There doesn't seem to be any specific requirement that they not make mistakes; it would probably default to negligence if it ended up in court.
[0] Some US territory is not inside any state, and there are federal laws that come into play when an act crosses state lines.
[1] Here's a statute from Alaska to that effect: https://www.akleg.gov/basis/statutes.asp#11.41.445
[2] https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/88R/billtext/html/HB01181H...
IIRC the state of Texas was pushing for much worse, but basically the 'victim' was going to end up getting dragged through the mud and probably be forced to admit to all sorts of fraud and felonies involved in forgery, fraud secondary to forgery, and whatever other crimes are involved when you engage in crime with falsified government ID etc so they settled to avoid her having to testify.
If there is no need: Never
It can also force pressure on the sites to more carefully filter minors to both avoid other jurisdictions following suite and criminal charges if continuing access to found to be granted French children.
> Another impossible to enforce law made by people who don't know what they're doing.
A law doesn't have to be 100% inescapable to be effective. In fact, this is an extremely enforceable law, and it is you who fail to see the application, either through ignorance or arrogance.
But it would be up to the parents to do this.
Wow - that is crazy for a country a 5th the population of the US.
> In this section we dive deeper into the Top 20 Countries by order of highest traffic.
With France ranked #2, which makes it seem like it's total traffic, not per capita.
I'm not a fan of these types of laws in the first place but, if we're going to have them, punishing distribution but not consumption will do nothing. On the other hand punishing consumption via law is just silly enough to most people (for now at least) that we end up with this law which only makes it inconvenient for adults to access porn.
I'm not so sure. Say you want to prevent children from accessing social media. Would you fine a child for that? Put them in jail?
On the other hand, it's pretty easy to ask Meta to verify the age. There are not a gazillion social medias out there: force them all to verify the age, and most children won't have access to them anymore.
The comparison to social media is a bit rough because the laws and focus there are around preventing children from creating accounts where their data is mined to be sold, the feeds are tailored to them, and their identities are publicly shared. The same laws do not actually attempt to prevent children without an account from viewing vacation photos. What applies in preventing account creation for social media does not necessarily apply to preventing content consumption itself in other cases.
I don't have a definitive opinion on Zero Knowledge Proof for social media access, but it seems like it may make it harder for children to access social media (the EFF is not really into those ZKPs, so apparently there are downsides too).
Not perfect, nothing ever is nor ever will be. Also never try to block teens, that is a foolish losing battle.
[1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single
Like in a location app on your phone generating (Lat Long) pairs. The app developer could just provide an inference engine running on a 3p trusted server to which an app developer has write only rights, e.g. a retrieval engine based on location — but cannot read. The user's app has read only rights — say get map tiles based on location.
Its just that this is not the universe we live in sadly...(Maybe the EU will become that)
But well distributing material via sneakernet is entirely possible and relatively cheap and easy. So after certain age they will get their hands on it.
And well, most will go to some other place that does not follow regulations. There is plenty of them and more will pop up.
If that ruling worked, they can extend it.
Let the industry be innovative and find solutions themselves to stay compliant.
It is not regulators responsibility to solve problems.
For example, a malicious inspector could open the site and pass any verifications in place while a minor is in the room, notice that the site did not prevent the minor from seeing the content, and fine the site.
Conversely, the site could claim they have found some fancy data analysis method to prevent access to minors in the wild while simply implementing some "we believe you are minor" page to be randomly generated once in a while, and claim in court that they have done their best and at most a small handful of children are getting around their complex protections.
In law making the is a concept of standards VS. Rules - look it up.
"you can not serve explicit erotica material to people under the age of 18" is very much a rule. It is super easy to asses whether you do it.
The law should not mandate how to comply.
Law makers do not care if you refrain from pressing the speeder or drive an under powered car.
The question is what role porn has.
Regardless, my comment was more aimed at how we regulate than the effects of porn.
Of course it's a lot easier for those in power to divert attention to a moral panic like porn instead of acknowledging that our economic system and core values are making people depressed and hopeless to the point that they're becoming incapable of performing the one thing they've been optimizing for over millions of years of evolution - reproducing.
Something indicates that the feeling of equality (which most easily can be achieved with actual equality) would be more beneficial.
But then again, this would likely require taxing - something in particular Americans loathe for some reason (hint: decades of aggressive propaganda)
I explicitly mention that I do not assume this is related to porn.
I merely say that we did not turn out fine.
Basically a cleaner society.
> This system, referred to as “double anonymity”, means the porn site receives only a yes-or-no confirmation that the user is of legal age. The age-check provider knows who the user is, but not which sites they visit.
Seems like a reasonable solution.
The only remainig problem (provider knowing that you watch some porn even if not - exactly what kind) could be solved by requiring some other websites to verify age too. For example horror movies or liveleak videos.
I have never had flashbacks from watching porn, but there are things I saw, even on broadcast TV, that still send shivers down my spine.
I am disappointed to see fellow Europeans developing American-style "sex is bad, violence is entertaining" social customs.
Article 227-24 also covers violent videos of that ilk.
I still would not lump pornography with gore and promotion of terrorism, but it is an improvement.
Why the absolute focus on demand side and none on the supply side?
I guess the issue is they just want to stop young people from seeing porn? That's it? That's all society is concerned about, regarding porn?
If you verify using say, bank credentials, though, then those adults can't do the same since they risk losing money. Minimum balance checks are also necessary so it's not a "nothing to lose" situation.
Important to set incentives right when doing bans like this. Historically, it's been implemented very badly wherever it's been tried.
Of course an outright ban is also not a problem IMO, but many differ on that.
As far as I understand, the implementation would let the porn website verify you're above 18, and the payment processor would only know that you interacted with a age verification service to verify your age, but not specifically what website is asking you to verify your age. That would seem good enough in terms of privacy, unless I'm missing something?