Court Rules in Pornhub’s Favor in Finding Texas Age-Verification Law Violates First Amendment
variety.com
Score one for Pornhub: A federal judge ruled Thursday that a Texas law requiring pornography sites to institute age-verification measures — and add prominent warning labels about the alleged …
  • Otome-chan
    59•1 year ago

    I was wondering their reasoning, here:

    We have publicly supported mandatory age verification of viewers of adult content for years, but any method of age verification must preserve user privacy and safety.

    Basically, they don’t disagree with mandatory verification, they just wish for it to do so in a way that doesn’t violate the privacy of adults legitimately accessing the content.

    Their suggestion for this is:

    The only solution that makes the internet safer, preserves user privacy, and stands to prevent children from accessing age inappropriate content is performing age verification at the device level.

    Essentially, do age verification on-device, and have the device send the okay to view signal to the site. This is something websites cannot implement on their own, until device/os developers implement such. I agree this is a good solution, but I think it’ll be difficult to push tech companies to do this without further legislation.

    I think it might be good to seek the EU to require tech companies to implement such a on-device feature, which will naturally roll out to all tech devices.

    Edit: these quotes are from the porn company, not the court.

    • @[email protected]
      21•1 year ago

      While I agree with most of what you said, I disagree that it’s a good thing for a government malware to be mandatory on everyone’s PC. Because soon the software alone isn’t enough, it needs to be flexible to every counties own law, with extra sniffing features and they’ll enforce that, I guarantee you, then uddenly we opened the devil’s doors.

      • EtzBetz
        1•1 year ago

        Where are we talking about installing malware? This could be implemented by the os itself, like many other similar things in the last years as well (password storage, covid nearby activity, …). The os could just ask the user to verify his age by identity card or similar, would then store a flag after verification and a browser -> website can access this.

        The only problem I see with this, if there is no verification on the other side, you could “just” have a browser which tells the website that the user is adult, no matter what, or, if it’s more dedicated, could even use a modified version of Linux to always have the flag set, haha.

        • @[email protected]
          3•1 year ago

          Or just idk monitor your kids browsing if you wanna be a snooping parent. Leave me the fuck alone with this policy nonsense.

        • @LufyCZ
          2•1 year ago

          Yeah I really don’t want to be scanning my ID card on my device to do anything like this.

          Slippery slope to it storing my name, address, birthdate, eventually sharing those things as well

    • Echo Dot
      17•1 year ago

      This is actually really good ruling. I’m shocked at the level of level headedness shown here. It’s not on brand America, stop it.

    • regalia
      14•1 year ago

      Sounds like they’re basically requiring parental controls on device, which I think is the optimal solution. Though a lot of parental control apps get really privacy invasive.

    • @[email protected]
      9•1 year ago

      Makes sense. If a device was flagged as < 18, then that device could include that info in each http request and www sites could respond accordingly.

      Would be easy, could be as simple as a checkbox in OS settings or parental security settings that are easily found in Apple & Microsoft.

  • @s38b35M5English
    17•1 year ago

    I remember when age ‘verification’ was a curtain in the video store, or a blackout bag on the magazine rack.