That being said, I’m a huge privacy advocate, and while there are actually ways to anonymously be on a website and verify age
How would that work? I’m not well-researched on this particular topic, so I’m curious how that would work.
Not sure why you’re getting down voted. Porn can absolutely become a behavioral addiction.
I used to work at a place where we had a lobby guard that watched porn on his phone all day (sound off). Not sitting there trying to jerk it, it was a compulsion. He would just be watching it while talking to other people, standing by the door…it was weird. He eventually got fired because he genuinely couldn’t not watch porn.
That being said, I’m a huge privacy advocate, and while there are actually ways to anonymously be on a website and verify age, that’s not how anyone is doing it. Things like signing up for an account on a site and scanning your ID are just abysmally stupid. There’s a zero percent chance that this system as is doesnt lead to data theft and possibly even extortion.
ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
magic_smoke@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
Key signing maybe?
You get a cert which is cryptographically signed by your government. They can prove its signed with the governments root cert, showing that its someone over 18, but not who.
That being said the key identifiers will probably still be attached to you in some government db, just not on the porn site.
Though the government could force the pornsite to hand over any logged ids. Some people would say that’s private, as they trust the government not to do stuff without a judges warrant.
As a trans woman relying on HIPPA to not be put on a list of those on HRT, I don’t really trust that much more, to be honest.
ArchRecord@lemm.ee 6 days ago
They can prove its signed with the governments root cert, showing that its someone over 18, but not who.
This is generally a pretty decent system in concept, but it has some unique flaws.
A similar system is even being developed by Cloudflare (“Privacy Pass”) to make CAPTCHAs more private by allowing you to anonymously redeem “tokens” proving you’ve solved a CAPTCHA recently, without the CAPTCHA provider having to track any data about you across sites.
They know someone who had solved a captcha recently is redeeming a token, but they don’t know who.
This type of system will always have one core problem that really can’t be fixed though, which is the sale and transfer of authenticated tokens/keys/whatever they get called in a given implementation.
Someone could simply take their signed cert, and allow anybody else to use it. If you allow the government to view whoever is using their keys, but not the porn sites, then you give the government a database of every porn user with easily timestamped logs. If you don’t give the government that ability, even one cert being shared defeats the whole system. If you add a rate limit to try and solve the previous problem, you can end up blocking access if a site, browser, or extension, is just slightly misconfigured in how it handles requesting the cert, or could break someone’s ability to use their cert the moment it gets leaked.
And even if someone isn’t voluntarily offering up their cert, it will simply get sold. I’ve investigated sites selling IDs and SSNs for less than a dollar a piece before, and I doubt something even less consequential like an ID just for accessing online adult content would even sell for that much.
I’ve seen other methods before, such as “anonymous” scans of your face where processing is done locally to prove you’re an adult, then the result of the cryptographic challenge is sent back proving you’re over 18, but that would fail anyone who looks younger but is still an adult, can be bypassed by the aforementioned sale of personal data to people wanting to verify, and is often easily fooled by videos and photos of people on YouTube, for example.
magic_smoke@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 days ago
Who under the age of 18 will have money to buy these, and who would be willing to sell them for the pittance teenagers would be willing to spend?
echodot@feddit.uk 1 week ago
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single suggestion of a way to implement age verification that isn’t a privacy nightmare. Oftentimes they literally just want a credit card number, the assumption being that a child would never be able to get hold of such a thing.
In some of the worst cases they actually want a passport or other government ID sending to some organisation that would verify you. With all the fun potential data breaches that that would ensue.
Most of the time these rules never get off the ground because privacy advocacy groups basically sue over it and win every time.
ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 6 days ago
That’s more or less what I was implying, there’s not really any good way to implement it. Canada almost ended up implementing it, but thankfully Poilievre ended up losing the election including losing his own seat.
hansolo@lemm.ee 6 days ago
Tokenization is the easy solution.
You go onto you state gov website and get a token that just says “this is an adult.” Nothing else. Token lasts 10 minutes.
Cut and paste into the site. They authenticate without saying who theu are, back to the gov site, “yo, this legit?” State says “looks like something we would do.” State keeps no records of WHO validated the token, just that it was a legit token.
Same way that routers connect to VPN services.
echodot@feddit.uk 6 days ago
How does the state verify that you’re an adult and therefore should have a token?
This solution simply seems to be kicking the can down the road
ianhclark510@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
I’d advocate for us to update our ID systems to be able to verify age without the risk of data theft or extortion, but that’s not really relevant to this conversation, just kinda talking to the void
venusaur@lemmy.world 6 days ago
I totally agree. Everybody is misinterpreting what I’m saying into being an advocate for the ways they’re implementing the restrictions. They need a punching bag. I get it. I’ll be it.
But some people here don’t want to admit porn addiction exists. That’s a sign that it is a problem.
Vanth@reddthat.com 6 days ago
Sounds like a better state-backed initiative would be to make mental health services available to this dude and to anyone else dealing with addiction issues. Especially since I assume this door guard was older than 18 and age verification, no matter how private, would have done nothing to stop his access to porn.
hansolo@lemm.ee 6 days ago
Also true, no doubt there.