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Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

> I don’t think minors should be exposed to porn.

The problem with that is that minors will be looking at porn. You're not going to stop a horny 16 year old.

These laws will certainly take care of age gating the decent, well-willing websites. The shady, probably unmonitored, or even niche websites outside of the mainstream, won't.

Aside from the obvious VPN workaround, this will only push curious teenagers towards worse websites.

As for privacy risks, privacy-friendly methods do exist. Yivi (previously dubbed IRMA) is a proof-of-concept that has been running for a while for privacy-friendly verification and data exchange using signed attributes (https://irma.app/docs/what-is-irma/). A signed "user-is-over-18" attribute is all a website would need to verify a user's age, without any other details.

Privacy-friendly age verification won't stop the other risks and problems these law may impose, though.

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I’m not convinced by the argument. I believe porn use by minors is going up. That means they were impeded in the past more than they are impeded now. I believe age verification was a big part of that: folks were carded to buy Playboys. Sure you could get a fake card, but the barrier to entry was higher and that had an impact.

I also don’t take it as a good argument that, “some people will break the law and therefore there should be no law.” E.g., “decent, well-willing” people pay taxes but, “shady, probably unmonitored,” people don’t. Yet we don’t say, “there shouldn’t be taxes,” on this basis.

> I believe porn use by minors is going up.

Why do you believe this? I wasn't sure what to believe, and after some casual searches it seems like the percentage who reported ever having used pornography is actually decreasing, but the frequency of viewing pornography has gone up for those who actively view it. But it also seems to differ a lot by country, what I found for Sweden doesn't match what researchers found in Spain, for example, and I'm sure the US would be different too.

It would seem to me like parental controls and supervision of computer/phone use is much higher than when I was growing up. Basically none of our parents understand what this new "interwebs" thing was about today, but every parent today know exactly what it is. None of us kids had any parental controls on our computers AFAIK, but today it seems to be the norm, at least what I can tell from my own circles of acquaintances.

> I believe porn use by minors is going up.

In correlation, no doubt, with how many minors have cell phones that can be used anywhere, with a good expectation of privacy. It's not like how it was when I was a kid, where the average kid had access to maybe the family computer or, if they were lucky, a laptop.

> E.g., “decent, well-willing” people pay taxes but, “shady, probably unmonitored,” people don’t. Yet we don’t say, “there shouldn’t be taxes,” on this basis.

The better comparison would be with another vice. I don't particularly care about marijuana, but given the choice, is it better as a society to give people legal, certified, safe weed choices, or should it be relegated to street dealers that might cut their product with other stuff?

>minors will be looking at porn. You're not going to stop a horny 16 year old.

Sure, but this law will drastically reduce the amount of time the average 16-yo looks at porn. Also, if you are going to engage in a vice, then it is healthier if you have to exert some effort or run some risk (if only the risk of trying to access porn and failing) to do it rather than being able to do it perfectly safely from the convenience of your home -- and it is healthier if there is a delay between the impulse to look at porn and when you actually start looking.

I'd also add that Google is pretty good at filtering out unavailable websites. My country fights windmills by blocking anythink porn-related. And Google with simple "porn" search will remove those blocked websites, but would add millions of yet unblocked mirrors and whatnot, so this block is laughably easy to avoid. It's not like porn is scarce resource available on the selected websites, quite the opposite. I'd guess that French teenagers would just do the same: search "porn", open 100 new tabs, find one that works and close the rest.

>These laws will certainly take care of age gating the decent, well-willing websites

Lol they won't. dark IDs or just AI altering their IDs, the second france enforces such law there will be some entrepreneur that makes an AI bot that accepts your ID and then changes the DOB and then spits out the video/images for KYC.

Use the national ID that surely has a digital DB, and make the check against those, which unless some corrupt officials has edit rights to, won't allow those simple bypasses.

Assuming they can check EU wide, since france is party to treaties allowing mostly free migration throughout the EU to France and recognizes the authenticity of those EU nation states IDs for commerce and domicile in France.

Well, the mentioned credit card checks would be applicable regardless of your residency/citizenship, so if you're visiting France and try to browse Pornhub, you'd be required to provide CC details for the verification, is my understanding at least

Or you have a ID issued by France, and you'll use that.

Besides, heavily depends on how the verification services implement their checks. Whenever I (Spanish resident, Swedish citizen) end up having to do verification checks for some EU/Spanish service, they usually have more or less every type of ID I could have been using available.

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