[Discussion] How do you feel about age verification on Porn sites?

Porn sites Pornhub, XVideos, and Stripchat face stricter requirements to verify the ages of their users after being officially designated as “Very Large Online Platforms” (VLOPs) under the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA).

I personally have mixed feelings, as the information collection could be used to link individuals and profile them. Possibly leading to discrimination if abused.

But I also feel that any random kid shouldn’t be able to just go to these sites and see porn freely.
Ofc, there’s always going to be those who mange to circumvent any protection put in place but it’d be much harder then just clicking a link or typing in the address.

I also feel that parents should actively monitor their kids online activities and step up a Blocklist to pro-actively prevent kids from reaching these sites to begin with.

What are your thoughts on this?

skullgiver,
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

There are various ways in which age verification can be done without sacrificing privacy. Sadly, that requires standardised digital ID combined with several privacy preserving technologies that I’ve only seen used experimentally (I think Yivi comes closest, but its protocol involves sending identifiers between their servers and the consuming service, and requires services to be registered rather than arbitrarily accessible).

In its core, these protocols use digitally signed attributes (could be “SSN” or “birthday”, but more practically this could also just be “is over 18”). With this system, you can simply transmit the token that says “I’m an adult”, the website verifies this, and you’re done. To prevent abuse through infinite reuse, these apps need to be verified occasionally, and the secrets must not be stored somewhere they can be copied from easily, but phones have solved that problem ages ago.

Unfortunately, I don’t think governments who support these restrictions will also invest into these technologies. Perhaps efforts such as eIDAS will allow for some kind of non-profit to create and generate these tokens based on your standard digital government ID, but as of now, there’s nothing.

Any technology can be bypassed by kids (just steal dad’s porn pass!), so there’s a limit to how effective age gates are. On the other hand, anything that requires stealing stealing devices protected with a PIN will be sufficient in most cases.

Syo, (edited )
@Syo@kbin.social avatar

Absolute waste of tax money and resources, anyone advocating for this policy is an idiot and psychotic control freak that should never be allowed to opine on public policy.

Outdated values are driving this country back into the stone age. The body was designed to be horny as we go through teenage years. It's nature. Rather than guide kids on the safe path, fools would forbid, outlaw, prohibit until they can't control them after age of 18.

Here's how this plays out... Kids are going to masturbate, regardless. They will dive deeper into the Internet into places with no restrictions and be exposed to really messed up stuff. Hey at least the parent can pat themselves on the back, right, they were good partners that did everything right by the book, even paying the kid's therapist.

Moghul, (edited )

Which country would that be? This is EU related.

I don’t disagree with you otherwise. If we had a good age verification system that didn’t involve the website, only gave a boolean age check to the website, wasn’t logged at the government or any other level, I might think this was ok. But we don’t. So as soon as this starts I’ll pirate a bunch of porn.

Hillock,

I am in favor of stricter age verification for certain content. Not only for porn but also dating apps, social media, online shops, etc. But the current methods of age verification are a privacy nightmare and go well beyond what is reasonable. Especially since companies can't be trusted to not do bad stuff with that information.

What is necessary is a double anonymity age verification service. Ideally run by a company that by law is required to be very transparent. That way we don't have to provide personal information to companies that have no actual need for it but can still reduce the amount of minors getting into places they shouldn't be.

Yes, it won't be perfect, yes there will always be bad actors, but it will still do more good than harm.

I personally am open for a discussion about reducing the minimum age to view porn. I don't have strong feelings either way.

PhobosAnomaly,

I see your view and appreciate the time you’ve taken to articulate it well.

My view takes another level of abstraction from it, and ignoring the implementation detail for the moment - the question for me is “what are we trying to protect underage/vulnerable persons from?”

Sex is a natural thing and I’m not arsed either way - and some of the more extreme content (within the legal sense, non-consent and animal porn etc are another ball game) such as exploitative content or covertlyy recorded stuff really need to be addressed as society issues so that the ensuing pornography isn’t such an issue.

That said, the line defining the three (or more) groups is arbritary and different for everyone I guess.

Hillock,

Kids being able to openly participate on porn sites would be a feast for pedophiles and groomers. We already have enough trouble with that on social media and dating sites/apps. And while in an ideal situation there just wouldn't be bad people, sometimes we need to protect people from themselves because of others.

So while I am open for a discussion about lowering the age requirement, I still firmly believe a minimum age is required. But whether that's 14, 16, or 18 I don't know.

PhobosAnomaly,

That’s a fair comment, and represents the core tradeoff of balancing protecting vulnerable members of society against privacy or liberty concerns.

My preference would be to - in a massively reductive statement - teach the paedos that their urges are less-than-healthy and treat them as medical cases, in order to reduce the need for such content.

The other element is that it’s rarely a great idea to make sweeping reforms of a system that is failing because silly cunts are doing illegal things. I’m pulling a stat out of my arse here but why are we implementing legal interventions to prevent 5-10% of the population from downloading or producing illegal content, when surely it would be more effective to target those involved in the criminal practise rather than the other 90-95% of happy carefree legal chuggers?

I do see your point though, and it’s refreshing to see you’ve not gone straight for the “much chuldrun” trope.

n1ckn4m3,
@n1ckn4m3@kbin.social avatar

Very much this. A great many of us in our early 40s had access to pornography from BBSes or early internet and it didn't seem to fuck us up. Why are we trying to solve a problem that doesn't actually exist?

Legal sexual gratification between two consenting adults (even if some may find the way they achieve gratification taboo), so long as it's not illegal, should not be shamed or denied.

eager_eagle,
@eager_eagle@lemmy.world avatar

In the worst case a privacy nightmare, and in the best case useless.

RGB3x3,

“Please enter your age:”

Me, 15 years old: “Yes, I was born in 1973.”

eager_eagle,
@eager_eagle@lemmy.world avatar

“use this rotary phone to enter your year of birth”

bionicjoey, (edited )

That would probably actually be a decent age verification scheme

wheeldawg,

For 5 minutes

jasondj,

Nah there’s no kids on TikTok smart enough to figure it out and tell all the rest.

Zorque,

I think its the regulatory body's responsibility to provide a safe and secure service that can verify age requirements if they want to force that.

If they can't provide that service, they shouldn't require it, especially with such sensitive information.

admiralteal,

It is an absolute privacy nightmare. Nothing should be asking for your identity that doesn't have a DAMN good reason to be asking for your identity.

Age verification is not a damn good reason. Especially since any number of free VPNs can circumventing it with just a few clicks.

pipariturbiini, (edited )

Kids are smart. Horny teenagers even more so. They will find loopholes or ways to circumvent these kind of things - speaking from experience. At age 13 I installed a keylogger on my PC to get the password for a parental control software my parents installed. Roughly one year later I also exploited a vulnerability in iOS 4 that allowed me to see the parental controls password in plaintext so I could re-enable Safari.

Steamymoomilk,

Mr.hacker man? Lol Yeah adding restrictions is like the alchol prohibition in the US. Restricing it is going to make it more prevlent and easily acessible. There may be more sites that pop up that boot leg it. Kinda like schools with cool math games being blocked so you have unblocked games websites.

tacosanonymous,

I think there are a host of problems including equity, efficacy, privacy, etc.

We don’t need morality police, we need education and better health care. If parents have an issue, they need to parent better.

ShortN0te,

Electronic ids can provide the age verification without giving out any personal information. This is a solved problem at least for a lot of ids in the EU.

But no i still find it a stupid idea. It is the parents job to parent them.

EngineerGaming,
@EngineerGaming@feddit.nl avatar

That’s still worrying: wouldn’t some central authority know that “site X requested age verification for this person”?

ShortN0te,

No. There is no 3rd party service needed. It all can happen only between the service asking and the id (smart card).

mindbleach,

… and that’s different from the service having a record of your photo ID?

ShortN0te,

The service gets no other information other then “Is the holder of the id older then 18” => “Yes”

There is no personal data exchange.

mindbleach,

Oh, so it’s just some other service knowing you, personally, visited a particular porn site.

And that’s completely immune to leaks or government snooping.

ShortN0te,

No. Again. There is no other service involved. Pls do some research.

The basic idea is ZKP en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof

This here looks like a good write up: www.identity.com/zero-knowledge-proofs/

sir_reginald,
@sir_reginald@lemmy.world avatar

isn’t the id unique? which means that sites can trace every visit you make and what videos you watch every time?

ShortN0te,

No. Thanks to cryptography it is possible. The Cincept is called Zero-knowledge proof. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof

Here is a quick write up: www.identity.com/zero-knowledge-proofs/

sir_reginald, (edited )
@sir_reginald@lemmy.world avatar

thanks! if implemented correctly, this is a decent way of verifying age. Although I’d rather not have any but it’s definitely better than taking a selfie.

harry_balzac,

Exactly - it’s the parents’ responsibility.

Imagine any government telling car manufacturers that they have to verify that everyone who starts their vehicles has a valid drivers license.

RandoCalrandian,
@RandoCalrandian@kbin.social avatar

Don’t give them ideas, this is exactly the type of shit they want to enact

ares35, (edited )
@ares35@kbin.social avatar

give it time. the government (us) wants to put interlock gadgets into every new car to prevent drunks from driving. driving under the influence is illegal and those that do are more likely to kill someone. so is driving without a license, and so are those drivers.

PriorityMotif,
@PriorityMotif@lemmy.world avatar

There are also circumstances where it’s legal to drive over the legal bac. If someone is having a medical emergency then it’s legal to drive them to a hospital.

PhobosAnomaly,

It’s still illegal - however it’s a defence to prosecution to say that there was a form of emergency or other mitigating factors.

As always, the wording and mitigations are specific to the jurisdictions.

digdilem,

I suspect you haven’t worked with governments before.

Just because something is technically possible, it’s no guarantee that it will be the chosen mechanism for something. More likely the contract will be awarded to either the lowest possible bidder, or to a friend of a friend. Cronyism is depressingly common at all levels.

ShortN0te,

I suspect you haven’t worked with governments before.

Just because something is technically possible, it’s no guarantee that it will be the chosen mechanism for something. More likely the contract will be awarded to either the lowest possible bidder, or to a friend of a friend. Cronyism is depressingly common at all levels.

Not sure why you are under that impression. I never discussed the potential chosen mechanism.

I stated that it is possible and that it is already implemented into the id card of many eu citizens.

cheese_greater,

I don’t think about it except I canmt wait till one of its non-corporate authors gets into FO(finding out) tyme ;)

BrikoX,
@BrikoX@lemmy.zip avatar

But I also feel that any random kid shouldn’t be able to just go to these sites and see porn freely.

So they will just go to another site that doesn’t have age verification and doesn’t implement any security measures instead. Big sites are required to age check people before they are allowed to upload anything, that is not the case for most of the internet.

All age verification does is aggregate personal information and make it easy target for bad actors to steal. Instead of needing to go thought 100 sites, now that information & identities will be tied to a single database.

It’s also a slippery slope, since the same adult content is available not just on dedicated adult sites, but mainstream social media. Lemmy, Mastodon, Twitter, TikTok, Twitch (just recently wanted to allow nudity). Do you really want to have your identity tied to your online activity?

curiousaur,

Governments should not be taking on parental duties.

VolunTerry,

+1 here, friend. Spread the word.

skullgiver,
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

Perhaps, but too many parents are terrible at their jobs.

Would you argue the same thing with other age restrictions, such as buying alcohol/drugs, driver’s licenses, or child labour?

ElleChaise,

deleted_by_author

    •
    curiousaur,

    We should be charging parents if their kids are that bad.

    DaDragon,

    What? It is not illegal for children to access pornography. It is at best illegal for people to allow children access to pornography. (Outside of countries where pornography is banned outright)

    PriorityMotif,
    @PriorityMotif@lemmy.world avatar

    Those are crimes. I don’t think it’s a crime for a kid to look at pornography.

    ShellMonkey,
    @ShellMonkey@lemmy.socdojo.com avatar

    Fuzzy space (not that one), a lot of places it might get squished into the enabling/promoting deliqancy type rules. If you give beer/smokes to an underage kid you can be tagged for it.

    On a practical level proving any of the above is near impossible, but it might get you on the local’s radar if it keeps being accused.

    I do think we have it backwards in America where prime time crime drama is no problem but everyone freaks out over a butt cheek, but at the same time it’s not healthy to let little kids dig into some things unguided and before they’re ready.

    InEnduringGrowStrong,
    @InEnduringGrowStrong@sh.itjust.works avatar

    Watching porn … terrorism.
    I think I’m missing a few steps here.

    PhobosAnomaly, (edited )

    I’m making the assumption that you’re not deliberately daft enough to conflate the two issues of “a cheeky tug looking at some low resolution grot” and “mass casualty attack planning”, but surely you must see the difference between harmful content and porn, and why measures should be taken (however easy to circumvent) to disrupt terrorism or other large-scale atrocities?

    DaDragon,

    Yep. I spent a couple years as a child in a country with country-wide blocks on some internet content. However, google images wasn’t blocked (duh.) Reddit wasn’t blocked (not that I knew the site at the time).

    Only thing it changed from a user-perspective was using either shitty and seedy VPN’s or simply going to more questionable sites the authority blocklist didn’t know of yet. And I’ll be honest, I doubt that sites like xnxx (back then) are much better for a developing child than the somewhat controlled sites. There’s so many niche porn sites out there that they can’t all be blocked. You only end up blocking access to sites that are the flattest for access by minors, ironically. (To be clear, I’m not saying that it’s great that minors access that content, either)

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