I'm bringing this up because it's the perfect litmus test to show whether you really care about age verification, or if you want personal trackability for all internet behavior.
I'd be okay with this for certain situations (e.g. a forum that doesn't want to foreign agitators to pretend they are US voters), but the whole porn thing is a ridiculous farce because there are still going to always be millions of non-us porn sites that don't enforce US laws.
"Stranger Danger" is no longer don't get into a van with someone who promises you sweets kinda thing.
That's the implication of making a law.
It doesn't matter that you could do those things before the internet the normal and often only or only practical flow involves the net.
Counter offer we keep letting people manage their own kids' shit and they can control access to the degree they deem appropriate
We also have pi-hole running that blocks a lot of things, and can turn on and off certain domains (so they can play roblox etc for a short while, then its blocked again) and their devices are pretty locked down
The key is to be open about it and “more” than reasonable; allow things when requested that aren’t harmful.
If we’re too perfect at protecting them from the world they’ll have no tools to deal with the world, which they will have to do eventually.
Now why they came back, and weren’t working before? The restrictions were so full of holes that they didn’t really work as anything other than a speedbump.
You can't.
It would make sense to have the enduser verification ondevice with a simple reply to any online property : Passed age verification/or not.
Otherwise the centralization and eventual leak of this data is a can of worms in waiting.
Given that solution is unlikely to be legislated into action I would suggest people are just going to share adult content on Usenet, Tor, P2P, within G/PG rated video games by plonking down a virtual theater and streaming from a throw-away VM and fully automating syncing with LFTP+mirror+SFTP, sharing USB NVME drives, mobile ephemeral websites over WiFi and other methods when people get tired of this Top/Bottom relationship lobbyists want us to participate in. As a plus side, driving people underground means zero tracking, rules, taxes, obligations, leaking email addresses, etc...
1) It is vulnerable to modifications and hacks on the local device that get it to send back a "yes" result without actually verifying anything
OR
2) It requires the device to use some kind of closed, proprietary system that allows the service to guarantee that #1 cannot happen
Now, in general, the tech world is pretty happy to accept #2, but many of the people around here would object to it on very reasonable grounds.
At the end of the day the tool should be there enforcement down to the relevant local authorities or not.
Oh look, we’re back where we started. The only winning move is to not play.
Big tech did not want to cooperate to do this for some weird reason so now we get a much more complicated solution.
Yes I know that if your kid uses a live USB stick he could watch porn on his laptop but IMO is much easier for such a smart kid to find a website that does not respect the browser headers and torrent adult content.
Opposition to ID checks because you believe the internet should be open and free is reasonable but this article twists itself into knots throwing everything at the wall. And it is reasonable to believe it is a free speech issue. But we can’t say, at the same time, that the same arguments don’t apply outside of the internet.
(Convenience stores scan ID, bars scan ID, hotels take copies of passports…)
Scratch out the age in „online age verification“ and you get to real reason
Are we also at assume that the EFF fail to see the similarity of age-gating porn websites and age-gating entrance to strip clubs?
That doesn't seem likely to me, and I find it way more likely that the EFF is purposefully excluding the best argument against their chosen position.