Technology

There's no good way to do this without that information being available somewhere we don't want it for privacy reasons. You shouldn't trust a company with your information any more(or less) than the government.

Stop trying to be a nanny state, if people want to view porn, let them. If kids try to view porn, that's up to the parents to manage.

I don't really like all these anti-porn laws. If kids want porn, there are too many leaky buckets they can drink from. Hell, they could just messages pics and videos to each other.

That said, if we are forced to do strong verification, the best I can think of is some sort of mix of the ideas we use for certificate authorities and oauth.

Certificate authorities are really just trusted identity providers. In my solution, you would choose from a list of trusted identity providers. You provide them with all the private information necessary for them to validate your identity. From there a third party can validate information about you with your permission.

The way this workflow would work is similar to oauth workflows people are familiar with for Google, Facebook, and other single sign-on solutions. You go to a adult site, select your provider from a list of trusted identity providers, the adult site redirects you to the provider site, you log in and give the adult site the privilege to verify you are over 18. The browser redirects to the adult site. The adult site would get nothing else about you besides what identify provider you use and if you are over 18.

Now ultimately, you have to give your private details to someone but at least you don't have to give it to everyone. Unfortunately, your provider could potentially keep track of what sites you are allowing to verify your information. We would need strict laws on these providers on what records they are allowed to keep.

It will probably just kill off porn companies, have you seen how much porn is on telegram? People would just use that instead. ___

Porn is basically completely free nowadays anyway

There's already an answer to that. My state (and several others) have digital IDs that exist. I have an app on my phone called mID ( Mobile ID). I can present proof of just my age to a bartender using the app. They don't see my address, birthday, DLnumber... nothing... Just that I'm indeed 21+.

I can present a qr barcode that will grant someone the ability to see my ID... I can choose what information to send by default... and if someone is requesting more information I can view/approve if I choose to.

There's no reason why a simple request to this platform couldn't do it. I have the other side of the app that let's me read other people's qr codes and validate whatever information I "need" to validate. If I can do it as an individual... I don't see why website's couldn't.

Now... Do I want the state to particularly know that "BustySluts.com" wants to view my id? I can see this being intrusive... but there's already answers like charging 1 penny to a credit card as well.

I would wholeheartedly be against my ISP doing anything other than being a carrier for my data. The ISP wouldn't be able to tell if I'm on my computer or if my child is anyway. Middleware or not.

This problem is always approached from the wrong angle (requiring verification of adults to view adult material) instead of the more freedom- and privacy-preserving method of requiring child-friendly sites to advertise to the browser that they are suitable for child web browsers.

What I mean by this, and the way that I would solve this problem, is to introduce an HTTP header such as X-Child-Friendly: true or X-Content-Rating: E and to put the onus on parents to set the child's web browser to only allow browsing sites which return this header. Every browser would need to have a "Parental Control" mode that restricts browsing to sites that return this header, but this could easily become a standard. Instead of having every adult site implement your legislative controls, now you just need child-friendly sites to add a header to their responses.

The whitelist approach is less likely to allow adult sites to slip through the net, compared to the blacklist approach.

For those who say that children would find a way around this by installing a different browser or unlocking the parental controls: it should be the responsibility of parents to monitor their child's access to the internet and installation of software. The current approach of trying to enforce age-verification on adult sites just shifts the problem to other adult sites that are not under the jurisdiction of the legislation.

Forcing age-verification for adults also has a huge bureaucratic cost and potential for abuse and loss of privacy. I think we know why legislators prefer this approach, and it isn't to protect the children.

The ISP middleware is an interesting idea, basically an SSO (think the "Sign in with Google" you see everywhere). However, this would require some level of integration between every ISP and adult site, which would get seriously tedious as such things roll out all over the country. This doesn't even get into the fact that each law would vary somewhat in the specific requirements and that it just kicks the job to verifying IDs and ages to the ISP instead of the downstream site.