Texas' law, H.B. 1181, requires people visiting porn websites to prove their age by either uploading government-issued identification or a "commercially reasonable method" such as bank information. More than a dozen other states have passed similar bills, though they are all on hold pending what the Supreme Court decides.
> When I go to pornhub I have to click a button that days I’m 18.
if you were in Texas, it'd be not reachable at all [0]. this is due to a bill [1] that would have required Pornhub to use the more intrusive age-verification options. it also allows for significant fines for non-compliance. if a 16 year old kid used their 19 year old brother's ID to get through the verification, Pornhub could potentially be liable for up to $250k. and the broadest reading of that bill would mean that quarter-million fine applies every time a minor bypassed the age-verification check.
0: https://www.texastribune.org/2024/03/14/texas-pornhub-5th-ci...
1: https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/88R/billtext/html/HB01181F...
no, that's not accurate. quoting from the bill:
> A civil penalty imposed under this section for a violation of Section 129B.002 or 129B.003 may be in an amount equal to not more than the total, if applicable, of:
> (1) $10,000 per day that the entity operates an Internet website in violation of the age verification requirements of this chapter;
> (2) $10,000 per instance when the entity retains identifying information in violation of Section 129B.002(b); and
> (3) if, because of the entity's violation of the age verification requirements of this chapter, one or more minors accesses sexual material harmful to minors, an additional amount of not more than $250,000.
if they don't have a system for age verification, the possible fine is $10k per day. run a website for a year, and then the Texas AG gets around to filing a suit against you? that's a possible 3.65 million fine.
the possible $250k is on top of that, if minors access porn on such a website.
crucially, the law says the age-verification system used must be "reasonable" which gives prosecutors a significant amount of leeway. does your porn site use Honest Achmed's Age Verification Service? if that is easy to bypass, there's nothing stopping them from arguing in court that you may have implemented age-verification, but you didn't comply with the law because you didn't use a reasonable verification service.
That said, as a parent to teenagers, I don't know that I believe that age verification is such a terrible idea. The reality is that there's a lot of fucked up porn out there and blocking it effectively across all networks and every device is non-trivial. I understand this is a minority viewpoint on HN.
Of course I have absolutely no interest in uploading scans of my drivers license to porn sites so I don't know what the right answer is. I'm sure there's some cryptographic scheme whereby a 3rd party could verify my identity without knowing for what purpose and then the porn sites could validate that verification without disclosing who or what I'm doing. I dunno.
Which is one reason that the EFF is trying to lay down their argument that the technology won't work.
I agree with you. I’m very pro-privacy/anti-surveillance and pro-freedom, so I’m entirely against the invasive ID-based systems, but the problem you highlight is pretty real and has to be addressed somehow, and I’m just not sure what the solution is.
As a parent of very young children, I’d hope that we’ve already figured this out by the time my children are teenagers.
Also, I doubt your viewpoint is actually a minority viewpoint here—it’s more likely those with your viewpoint just won’t post it here.
The solution is client-side filtering/blocking software on the machines you own. And if your response is "but that's hard", that should increase your confidence that server-side filtering and verification are unacceptable. If even tech-savvy people can't get verification working on a local device-- which has the full, correct context who is using it and what should be blocked-- then certainly it's not going to get any better by mandating a solution at scale on the public Internet, where there is much less context about the individual user, credentials can be mocked, proxies can be used, and so on.
Would you be okay uploading your ID to online gambling sites?
Louisiana, AFAIK Does not require age verification, but all of our traffic goes to Dallas, so we get lumped in with Texas.