There’s absolutely something to be said for trying to ensure that people don’t have access to porn as kids, but that doesn’t come from what these legal battles inevitably want to impose, which is ID check requirements that create a massive treasure trove of data for attackers to target to steal IDs, blackmail individuals, and violate people’s privacy, while adding additional costs for porn sites that will inevitably lead to predatory monetization, such as more predatory ads.
The problem is that parents are offloading their own responsibility and education off themselves and schools, and instead placing an unworkable burden onto the sites that host and distribute pornographic content.
We know that when you provide proper sex education, talk to kids about how to safely consume adult content without risking their health, safety, and while setting realistic expectations, you tend to get much better outcomes.
If there’s one thing I think most people are very aware of, it’s that the more you try and hide something from kids, the more they tend to try and resist that, and find it anyways, except without any proper education or safeguards.
It’s why abstinence only education tends to lead to worse outcomes than sex education, even though on the surface, you’re “exposing” kids to sexually related materials.
This doesn’t mean we should deliberately expose kids to porn out of nowhere, remove all restrictions or age checks, etc, but it does mean that we can, for example:
- Implement reasonable sex education in schools. Kids who have sex ed generally engage in healthier masturbation and sex than kids who don’t.
- Have parents talk with their kids about safe and healthy sex & relationships. It’s an awkward conversation, but we know it keeps kids healthier and safer in the long run.
- Implement a captcha-like system to make it a little more difficult (and primarily, slower and less stimulating) for kids to quickly access porn sites. Requiring certain somewhat higher level math problems to be solved, for example. This doesn’t rely on giving up sensitive personal info.
Kids won’t simply stop viewing porn if you implement age gates. Kids are smart, they find their way around restrictions all the time. If we can’t reasonably stop them without producing a whole host of other extremely negative consequences, then the best thing we can do is educate them on how to not severely risk their own health.
It’s not perfect, but it’s better than creating massive pools of private data, perverse financial incentives, and pushing people to more fringe sites that do even less to comply with the law.
venusaur@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I understand and agree with what you’re saying. I think people should need licenses to have kids, but that’s a different story.
The conflict that this often boils down to is that the digital world does not emulate the real world. If you want to buy porn in the real world, you need ID, but online anything goes. I love my online anonymity just as much as everybody else, but we’ll eventually need to find some hybrid approach.
We already scan our faces on our phones all the time, or scan our finger on our computer. How about when you want to access a porn site you have to type in a password or do some biometric credential?
I think 50% or more of the resistance of restricting porn is really just that people really love porn and are ashamed of what they view. There’s a whole other social psychology that needs to change in regards to how we view sex and I agree with more education.
ArchRecord@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
The problem is that because the internet is fundamentally different from the real world, it has its own challenges that make some of the things we do in the real world unfeasible in the digital world. showing an ID to a clerk at a store doesn’t transmit your sensitive information over the internet to/through an unknown list of companies, who may or may not store it for an undetermined amount of time, but doing so on the internet essentially has to do so.
While I do think we should try and prevent kids from viewing porn at young ages, a lot of the mechanisms proposed to do so are either not possible, cause many other harms by their existence that could outweigh their benefits, or are trivially bypassed.
Those systems are fundamentally different, even though the interaction is the same, so implementing them in places like porn sites carries entirely different implications.
For example, (and I’m oversimplifying a bit here for time’s sake) a biometric scan on your phone is just comparing the scan it takes each time with the hash (a processed version) of your original biometric scan during setup. If they match, the phone unlocks.
This verification process does nothing to verify if you’re a given age, just that your face/fingerprint is the same as during setup. It also never has to transmit or store your biometrics to another company. It’s always on-device.
Age verification online for something like porn is much more complex. When you’re verifying a user, you have to verify:
This all carries immense challenges. It’s fundamentally incompatible with user privacy. Any step in this process could involve processing data about someone that could allow for:
This also doesn’t include the fact that most of these can simply be bypassed by anyone willing to put in even a little effort. If you can buy an ID or SSN online for less than a dollar, you’ll definitely be able to buy an age verification scan video, or a photo of an ID.
Plus, for those unwilling to directly bypass measures on the major sites, then if only the sites that actually fear government enforcement implement these measures, then people will simply go to the less regulated sites.
In fact, this is a well documented trend, that whenever censorship of any media happens, porn or otherwise, viewership simply moves to noncompliant services. And of course, these services can be hosting much worse content than the larger, relatively regulatory-compliant businesses, such as CSAM, gore, nonconsensual recordings, etc.
venusaur@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Do it like this: you have to go to a notary and show your ID and they don’t scan it or anything, but they then authorize you to create an account with biometric credentials. Now only you can use that account to watch porn online. Hybrid approach.
ArchRecord@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Authorize you how?
That would involve someone having the ability to see which accounts where made, when, and how they were authorized, not to mention likely being able to track when they’re used in the future.
What does this mean? Do you mean you verify your biometric data with the notary to prove it’s you? Your ID should be enough. Do you mean where your biometric data is your password? This doesn’t prove it’s you. If processing is on-device like how phone lock screens work, then a simple piece of software could just extract the raw credentials and allow people to use/sell/transfer those, bypassing the biometrics. If it requires sending your biometric data to the company to log in like a traditional password flow, then all my previous issues with biometric verification online become present.
There’s still a key difference between this hybrid approach and, like I mentioned previously, buying alcohol by showing your ID to a clerk at a counter, and it’s that the interaction ends there. If you show ID, buy alcohol, then leave, the store doesn’t do anything after that. There’s no system monitoring when or how much you’re drinking, or if you’ve offered some of that drink to someone underage, for example.
But with something like what you’re proposing, the unfortunate reality is that it has to have some kind of monitoring for it to functionally work, otherwise it becomes trivially bypassed, and thus the interaction can’t end when the person leaves.
Not to mention the fact that not all platforms people find porn on are actually dedicated porn sites. Many people are first exposed via social media, just like how they’re exposed to much of their other information and general knowledge nowadays. If we want to age gate social media porn consumption as well, we then need to age verify everyone regardless of if they intend to view porn or not, because we can’t ensure it won’t end up on their feed.
There’s a reason why I’m so strongly against these verification methods, and it’s because they always cause a whole host of privacy and security issues, and don’t even create a strong enough system to prevent unauthorized porn viewing by minors in the first place.