Another Conflict Between Privacy Laws and Age Authentication–Murphy v Confirm ID
20 comments
·February 28, 2025mianos
chii
i just dont understand why pollies continue to try implement age and verification policies, and always try to use the "think of the children" argument.
Nobody wants it. It's a form of control on the internet that i would not desire. I don't care about preventing any harm, because the said harm doesn't get prevented in the first place, and new harm is placed on me!
Therefore, anyone in their right mind ought to completely oppose any sort of verification scheme on the internet. If you want verification, get the customer to pay a nominal amount via credit card - that is as far as it ought to be allowed to go. Any further, which includes demanding by law for verification, should not be allowed.
camillomiller
I think this is one of those processes that the free market can’t solve unless you have extremely strict regulation. As bad as it sounds, I also think a government funded partially public entity should provide this form of verification. If you remove the need to profit to be sustainable for a company like this you remove the need for growth. And if you do that, you also remove the need to find sketchy ways to exploit the data.
LinuxBender
The free market would likely go for a low friction solution. Require adult and all sites that allow anyone to upload content to add the RTA header. Make a law putting liability device/app makers to look for the RTA header and put the overall liability of enabling parental controls on the parents. App out of compliance could be pulled from the app store until compliant. Not perfect in any way but is trivial to implement. [1] Plenty of sites have already implemented it. [2] Privacy compliant, no data leakage, no sharing identities, no third parties.
Server operators just add one header, done. App and device developers would have to dig up some old code that can look for a header and check parental controls. Most kids are on phones and tablets. Complete mobile in two years as phase one. Desktops four years out as phase two. That may seem like a long time but this discussion has been ongoing since 2001 at least.
All the big tech companies have lobbyists. Have your lobbyists push for this and this could become a non issue in very little time.
[1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#response...
[2] - https://www.shodan.io/search?query=RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-R...
jcranmer
In the TV space, there's been, for 30 years (and mandatory in all new TVs in the US for the past 25), the V-Chip [1], which was specifically designed to be able to let parents disable viewing of inappropriate content. So it's not like the government hasn't gone down this path before.
I suspect the issue is that the user-side voluntary disabling of access means that--like with the V-Chip--almost no one will go about doing it, and that for many of the people trying to push for porn site restrictions, the side effect of forcing porn sites to close down is actually a desirable effect.
LinuxBender
Yup I remember the V-Chip. That was similar but just different enough that it made more sense that it never took off. That would have required adding a module to all televisions that would incur cost and would have also changed which entities in the television industry had control over their content. That industry has always been plagued by layers of bureaucracy.
The internet on the other than has let website operators have more freedom to govern themselves with some exceptions. I think in this case implementing RTA headers while it would have some cost it is leveraging existing code, web and load balancing platforms and just bringing back header checks in applications which many apps already know how to do and then calling the parental checks that also already exist in many devices and in some cases the UI is just hidden.
alwa
This seems like an elegant approach. Why hasn’t it gained as much traction as these third-party-ID kinds of approaches?
Is it just the lack of an organized constituency? Resistance from device manufacturers/store operators? Too much control situated with individual families, so the absolutist political voices feel like it’s not pure enough? Or do they figure it’s too easy for a clever kid to bypass?
LinuxBender
A bit of all of the above. Third party solutions mean some orgs and politicians can slurp up data and provide it to other third parties for kick-backs. Both RTA and third party can be bypassed and in fact would lead to more teens getting into credit card fraud and potentially giving them a criminal background before their careers even get started whereas bypassing RTA would not create yet more criminals. Gotta feed the prison industrial complex. Small children the original intended focal point would not be bypassing RTA thus giving good parents time to educate them on risks of websites and the people participating on them. Third party tracking allows people against porn to identify what kinks people are into much like Epstein lured people into compromising positions to blackmail them. Even if that is not their intention their sites will be hacked to acquire and sell that information for that purpose. With the RTA header none of this is possible.
Until big porn companies, social media companies or any companies use lobbyists to implement RTA it just won't happen. I bring it up when this topic comes up quarterly year over year. I've beaten the dead horse so many times the dust has evaporated. It's rather silly now since the original RTA header was the ICRA PICS header much more complex to implement. Adding a single simple header and looking for a header is trivial which means the obstacles are entirely human made and artificial. Perhaps when governments start creating more expensive laws and penalties around user contributed content things may change.
Terr_
Exactly, have sites merely disclose rough categorizations, move the decision-smarts to devices, and put control in the hands of the owners of those devices.
This places a majority of the cost of implementation on the people who actually want to use it, avoids a creepy Orwellian surveillance system, and enforcement is moved into a physical immediate reality that the average parents can see and monitor.
It also means you don't need to worry about visitors who are unmarried under the age of 16 years and three full moons who may not see unclad ankles in Elbonia.
protocolture
>I think this is one of those processes that the free market can’t solve unless you have extremely strict regulation.
The free market solves it by not doing it.
chii
and that is the correct solution. Verification is not required on the internet.
mikem170
Might be a way to give the post office something useful to do. They already have offices everywhere.
camillomiller
In Germany in fact we have Postident, which works fine, but is a bloated and unintuitive process and only makes sense for higher-margin and higher risk verification purposes, like opening a Bank Account.
The28thDuck
Isn’t that what the DMV is in the US?
2OEH8eoCRo0
We aren't anon on the web and we need to get over it.
Fine sites that allow minors to view porn and the free market will figure out age verification real quick.
itscrush
Why isn't your name in your profile here or why aren't you easily identified if that's the case? You're not all that identifiable here.
ETH_start
No. Sites shouldn't have to ID everyone that uses them. The internet shouldn't be turned into a nursery for children just because parents don't want to do their job and supervise their children while they're on the internet. If you want a curated internet that is child-appropriate, then you create your own private internet. You don't force the rest of the world to censor itself.
hooverd
We should be though.
Also, what is porn and who gets to define what porn is?
I like the snide comment that implies the Australian government does not have a clue about the consequences of their policies, let alone any idea whatsoever how to verify age without government ID. The Australia politicians are the laughing stock of the world and that's a pretty competitive arena lately!