this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Court Rules in Pornhub’s Favor: Age-Verification Law Violates First Amendment (variety.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
42 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/2168303

Archived version: https://archive.ph/1rtQu
Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20230901022438/https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/pornhubs-texas-age-verification-law-violates-first-amendment-ruling-1235709902/

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

I was wondering their reasoning, here:

We have publicly supported mandatory age verification of viewers of adult content for years, but any method of age verification must preserve user privacy and safety.

Basically, they don't disagree with mandatory verification, they just wish for it to do so in a way that doesn't violate the privacy of adults legitimately accessing the content.

Their suggestion for this is:

The only solution that makes the internet safer, preserves user privacy, and stands to prevent children from accessing age inappropriate content is performing age verification at the device level.

Essentially, do age verification on-device, and have the device send the okay to view signal to the site. This is something websites cannot implement on their own, until device/os developers implement such. I agree this is a good solution, but I think it'll be difficult to push tech companies to do this without further legislation.

I think it might be good to seek the EU to require tech companies to implement such a on-device feature, which will naturally roll out to all tech devices.

Edit: these quotes are from the porn company, not the court.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Such an on-device feature would either be trivial to break (if it's an ordinary API) or be impossible to implement in an open-source browser and OS (if it's some locked-down DRM-like thing), and the latter is not privacy-preserving because proprietary software tends to be spyware.

If these moralizers would just shut up, go away, and stop trying to ruin the Internet, that'd be great.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

The whole internet censorship doesn't make any sense to begin with. We already have decades of free online porn and everyone is fine. Why would we try to limit porn usage online now? It's a cry for regulations from overprotective nannies. These blocks don't work anyways as it just needs one single kid with access to porn and they'll share it with the others. To believe we can control that is crazy.

No tool in the world will block new sites emerging not yet added to the filter or people from installing an uncensored browser.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We already have decades of free online porn and everyone is fine. Why would we try to limit porn usage online now?

32 years ago we were passing around 320x240 interlaced jpeg's on floppy disks downloaded from a 4800baud BBS. You had to be James fucking Bond to view that stuff on the family computer in the living room, or in the back of the computer lab. I remember sitting at the back of lab with some friends watching an image load of a disk and trying to figure out which hole his dick was in. That's how slow it was.

Today, you can get streaming 4k videos on your 7 inch computer while you're sitting at the back of the bus, or the back of class. I'd say accessibility to minors has greatly improved over the past 3 decades. Regulators are (as usual) playing catch-up with technology.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Before Internet video porn, kids were finding their dads' Playboys and VHS tapes.

And before that, people living in cabins or caves had sex in full view of their children because there was nowhere else to do it.

Children seeing adults bang is not even remotely new, and nothing overly bad ever came of it. The only reason anyone is concerned with this is because their screwed-up religion taught them to be afraid of sex, and that is not an adequate justification for compromising innocent adults' privacy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wish regulators good luck trying to regulate bittorrent and other peer to peer software. Not to even talk about what can be found with just installing the tor browser

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

They'll make it inconvenient to use anything but their DRM protected browser and DRM protected and certified OS. It's going to be like with android, where rooting your phone makes it impossible for most banks to do online banking. I personally stopped rooting my phone as I'm not fortunate enough to own two and carry two with me. Eventually they'll get you.

And guess what Google and Microsoft currently work on with the new web technologies, exactly what described above.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

My bank app works fine with rooting last I checked. These days I just run a custom rom with gapps. The thing is that nothing Google and Microsoft do will matter in this case as there will always be websites that don't use it. Especially when talking about Piracy and websites running on tor or i2p. Even if illegal, new options will show up

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I agree with your main points, but I don't think that just because something has been the status quo it doesn't deserve scrutiny. There are those out there who feel that this is an issue. For them, the best time to explore it is now. At this point it's futile, but I think it's important that we re-evaluate our laws and policies when there's a group asking for it. We just need to make sure the people making the decisions at the end of the day are competent...

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This group has been demanding the censorship of porn, consequences be damned, for decades now. They have failed thus far, and the sky has not fallen as a result, so it's pretty clear that it's safe for society and the courts to continue to dismiss their irrational hysteria.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Personally I believe that there should be at least some attempt to protect kids from seeing adult content online. Ideally of course it'd be parental responsibility, but having some sort of system in place would be good. I think the tech around porn as it currently exists is deeply harmful, both for children and for women. I'm not against porn as a thing, but like.... come on, we can't just be spreading around videos without any sort of filters and removing it from the control of the people featured in the video.

There's not a good technical solution for these problems just yet it seems. I think the idea of age verification on-device, and then sending an 18+ or minor flag to apps/sites/etc. would be a good solution. We already click on a "I'm 18+" button, and this is functionally the equivalent but having age verification going on completely offline. Yes, people could bypass that with technical knowhow, but the point isn't to stop adults, it's to largely prevent kids from seeing this stuff.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It should be up to the parents. If they give a shit then they should deal with it. If they don't then whatever. It shouldn't be up to the government to decide and regulate it because they're going to do a poor job creating the rules, and probably some conservatives are going to have things blocked that aren't porn and are helpful to some kid's sexual education because they're regressive.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

some conservatives are going to have things blocked that aren’t porn and are helpful to some kid’s sexual education because they’re regressive.

That sounds like the real motivation for this nonsense: not to protect kids from harm, but to protect their parents from the responsibility of properly educating them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

as people say for hate speech laws: "if you aren't wanting to show children anything sexual, then there shouldn't be a problem. what do you wish to show kids that you think may be considered sexual?"

naturally gov overreach is a concern even for speech but that doesn't stop people from trying to regulate speech.

I think ultimately though with the system in place mentioned, it wouldn't completely block access to educational materials as parents could easily show that stuff to their kids if they so choose.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You severely underestimate kids' technical know-how. If it can be broken, they will break it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Not necessarily.

Recently we got a new LG TV that has an age lock option with some other family settings. The parent can turn it on with a PIN, and they can set up restrictions.
The same approach could be used here. But this would need 2 things: obviously support by the web browser app, and support by the OS to tie app installs, uninstalls and data wipes to the parent's code.

To help with cases when the device is sold, maybe the parent should press a button every year that they still want this, and also receive an email notification when the period is nearing it's end.

But a much better solution is that parents are dealing with their children.
They may see up some site filters, but when they notice that their child is using a workaround then it should be punished with taking away the phone.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Just an another HTTP header, flagging if user is an adult. Set it to False if OS reports that the account used has parental controls enabled.

This is just meant to keep children out, not protect state secrets.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

HTTP headers can be faked. Easily.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That will keep children out for about 12 seconds.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Maybe, but if their parents failed to enable parental controls or the kids hack them, they shouldn't be allowed to blame the websites.

There's already plenty of options available to parents - legislators must be made to stop blaming websites when parents don't use those tools available to them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Zero knowledge proof. Trusted issuer issues proof of birthdays. User submits proof of minimum age without disclosing additional information.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That would require you to disclose proof of your real-life identity to some dubious company for the purpose of unlocking porn. Definitely not privacy-preserving.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The company you disclose your age and online reference to doesn't need to know how their confirmation will be used. It could be an entity already knowledgeable (DVLA, IRS).

But yes, if porn is the only use case then this method is self incriminating.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

But yes, if porn is the only use case then this method is self incriminating.

That is precisely the problem. It will mostly or only be used for porn.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yes, mainly:

Porn, licor, tabaco, gambling.

But also:

Jobs, dating, discounts, insurance etc.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Not really. Most social media involves some rudimentary age verification, even though their age threshold is lower. Same goes for banking and interacting with government sites. Far from the only ones.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

While I agree with most of what you said, I disagree that it's a good thing for a government malware to be mandatory on everyone's PC. Because soon the software alone isn't enough, it needs to be flexible to every counties own law, with extra sniffing features and they'll enforce that, I guarantee you, then uddenly we opened the devil's doors.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Where are we talking about installing malware? This could be implemented by the os itself, like many other similar things in the last years as well (password storage, covid nearby activity, ...). The os could just ask the user to verify his age by identity card or similar, would then store a flag after verification and a browser -> website can access this.

The only problem I see with this, if there is no verification on the other side, you could "just" have a browser which tells the website that the user is adult, no matter what, or, if it's more dedicated, could even use a modified version of Linux to always have the flag set, haha.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Or just idk monitor your kids browsing if you wanna be a snooping parent. Leave me the fuck alone with this policy nonsense.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Exactly. It's gonna find ways around anyway.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah I really don't want to be scanning my ID card on my device to do anything like this.

Slippery slope to it storing my name, address, birthdate, eventually sharing those things as well

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is actually really good ruling. I'm shocked at the level of level headedness shown here. It's not on brand America, stop it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wait for florida to start making porn illegal.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Oklahoma will do it first then Utah will do it so they can pretend it wasn't their idea.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sounds like they're basically requiring parental controls on device, which I think is the optimal solution. Though a lot of parental control apps get really privacy invasive.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sounds like it still leads to surveillance.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago

Not if it stays on device and offline

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Makes sense. If a device was flagged as < 18, then that device could include that info in each http request and www sites could respond accordingly.

Would be easy, could be as simple as a checkbox in OS settings or parental security settings that are easily found in Apple & Microsoft.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Why does it remind me of this? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_bit

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

So, device attestation, eh? I think I heard such API proposal before, but where 🤔...

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

I remember when age 'verification' was a curtain in the video store, or a blackout bag on the magazine rack.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Faptestic!