this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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US States enforcing new age verification for adult content—how could this be done properly? (social.rights.ninja)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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US States enforcing new age verification for adult content—how could this be done properly?

@technology

Seeing the news about Utah and Virginia over in the US, there's been a lot of discourse about how unsafe it is to submit government ID online. Even the states that have their own age-verification portals are likely to introduce a lot of risk of leaks, phishing, and identity theft.

My interest, however, focused on this as an interesting technical and legislative problem. How _could_ a government impose age-verification control in a better way?

My first thought would be to legislate the inclusion of some sort of ISP-level middleware. Any time a user tried to access a site on the government provided list of adult content, they'd need to simply authenticate with their ISP web credentials.

Parents could give their children access to the internet at home or via cellular networks knowing this would block access to adult content and adults without children could login to their ISP portal and opt-out of this feature.

As much as I think these types of blocks aren't particularly effective—kids will pretty quickly figure out how to use a VPN—I think a scheme like mine would be at least _as effective_ as the one the governments have mandated without adding any new risk to users.

What do you all think? Are any of you from these states or other regions where some sort of age-restriction is enforced? How does this work where you are from?

Edit:

Using a simple captive portal—just like the ones on public wifi—would probably be the simplest way to accomplish this. It's relatively low friction to the end-user, most web browsers will deal with the redirect cleanly despite the TLS cert issues, and it requires no collection of any new PII.

Also, I don't think these types of filters are useful or worth legislating, I'm just looking at ways to implement them without harming security or privacy.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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

@BlameThePeacock

It's the US republicans who want to do this, not me, I'm just approaching this as an interesting problem.

As for my suggested solution, the only database would be the list of sites with adult content. No new personal data would be stored about individuals.

I'm not suggesting that ISPs implement photo-ID checks, just a login with your ISP username/password (an account you already have).

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

The ISP suggestion simply doesn't work. ISPs would then know who is browsing what within a family, far too big of a privacy problem. It's already bad enough that they can see and track everyone's browsing.

On top of that, it doesn't deal at all with multi-user devices like a family PC. Kid could just jump on and watch porn after dad/mom finishes because it's not going to ask for a login every single time or then you'll actually be tracking which adults are using porn specifically.