Age verification doesn’t work
166 comments
·September 5, 2025nomilk
verisimi
> And it will outright prohibit young people from getting information from non-permitted sources (of course, legacy sources are not affected - incidentally, they're probably more harmful than the prohibited sources).
Verification is the stick, AI is the carrot.
More than one answer is a bug - Eric Schmidt
general1465
> Given Australia doesn't even require Age Verification on porn sites (only on social media sites)
Am I only one who sees loophole in creating a social media site, which will be a porn site first? FaceHub or Pornbook.
Freak_NL
FetLife? It exists, and is subject to the same laws and regulations. Any legal site will have to comply to a load of regulations, supplemented by the inscrutable rules laid down by Visa and Mastercard.
shakna
Not a loop hole. The Minister may declare anything to be a social media site. The law does not restrict what may be considered.
blitzar
It's called X.
nomilk
X is one of the prohibited sites for under 16's in Australia (falls under 'social media'), but someone should seriously tell Elon about this, because it may work and would be hilarious.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
How am I going to find cisgender porn on there though
lordhumphrey
The 'internet tax' will not last, either, I fear.
Loads of VPNs are simply, someone other than the local ISP gets your data. Mullvad seems trustworthy, as an exception to this, and who else? And even then, Mullvad faces issues from websites and censorious countries trying to block it and bother its users all the time.
littlecranky67
Proton includes a VPN in their office365 competitor Proton Business Suite. While big sites like Netflix don't want you to use VPN, I am sure porn sites are very happy to let you through once your VPN address is not longer in a jurisdiction that requires AV.
Hizonner
... but I don't care if my ISP or the VPN knows I'm watching porn. I just want to actually be able to watch it.
ghssds
What about a VPS and ssh -D ?
lordhumphrey
As the other replies allude to, it worked at one stage.
This subjective and lovely history of the Great Firewall of the PRC was posted recently, about the to and fros in the methods of this kind of thing, and is really very good, if you're interested:
intothemild
Easily blockable. The early days of getting around Netflix was just using a commercial VPN. Then they blocked all those.
Then we transitioned to a VPS and hosting our own VPN.. then they blocked all VPS IP ranges.
What came next was VPNs that were using other people's home connections (either willingly or otherwise)
roygbiv2
Where is your VPN hosted? A lot of sites will block vps hosts.
Bender
an 'internet licence' (submit ID's to myriad sites), or an 'internet tax' (VPN).
Or learning one of the many non-http ways that people share porn and other things or people sharing among friends on small private or semi-private forums, chat servers or sharing porn in video games as many teens do. Beyond that is paying the slowness tax of tor hidden .onion sites which can be sped up by disabling 3 hops.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
That is a tax
Bender
That is a tax
For many it would be. I started with FTP and then SFTP so it's muscle memory for me and it's a lot faster than using a browser when used optimally with LFTP+SFTP+mirror, much like rsync but works with chroot SFTP-only. Groups can fully automate sharing their own collections with one another, entirely hands off no pun intended.
classified
> or an 'internet tax'
As always, the rich get to buy their way out of pretty much everything while the poor get the crap treatment.
delusional
> of course, legacy sources are not affected - incidentally, they're probably more harmful than the prohibited sources
What a silly idea. The modern world was built while traditional media existed. The decay and backsliding conicides with modern day social media. How does that point to traditional media being the culprit?
nomilk
In the extremes, both ideas are right. In terms of timeliness, relevance, quality, rigour, variety, discussion and debate the worst content on social media is orders of magnitude worse than the worst content on mainstream media.
But the inverse is also true: the best content on social media is orders of magnitude better than the best content on mainstream media.
An individual should be able to choose what works for them, not have the government disallow swaths of sources.
Telemakhos
I don’t understand what “traditional media” means in this context. Before the internet, kids didn’t have access to porn. It just wasn’t there when I was growing up. I’m sure someone out there had 8mm or 16mm porn films, but I as a child had no clue where to find those, and the physical stores selling them were not accessible: I didn’t have transportation to them, and they checked ID at the door. I heard of Playboy through friends at school, but I had zero access to it myself. I don’t think that was unusual.
Today every eight year old can browse Motherless for free with the same tablet he uses to watch whatever slop it is parents let their kids watch instead of educating them. That’s not a difference between “legacy” and “modern” porn but between zero access and full access.
delusional
The parent comment was talking about the other meaning of "media", the "news media". "Traditional media" then means newspapers, radio, and TV. As opposed to "new media" which is idiots yelling at each other on twitter or whatever.
Aeolun
> The internet licence will make it difficult for both authors and readers on alternative media platforms
Not really? Like the article says, they’ll just go to sites that don’t require age verification.
nomilk
Hard to argue that isn't an inconvenience. In other words, the outcome is the same, but thanks to government intervention, everyone's worse off.
A good example of where social media can really matter is for say, gay kids in a religious households, where they might not be able to talk to someone in person. Social media makes it easy to create a dummy account and visit forums for advice or reassurance.
DrillShopper
Once again showing that the best way to make money in that market is to just break the law.
aaron695
[dead]
ckbkr10
I wish there was a honest discussion, I am with them about parents not giving a shit and pushing away responsibility. The idea of supervision in education institutions is good as well.
The kids in my family were well protected and supervised, they got into contact with hardcore porn at the age of 6 when other kids had access to smartphones and exposed them to it.
I would like to see a honest discussion about the impact of porn on kids, I cannot really imagine that it doesn't distort the view and expectations on sex.
In my 20s I was promiscious and lived what I saw in pornography, only later in life I learned about normal sex.
In germany we had a state sponsored porn flick once produced by ZDF Neo, maybe that is the approach to expose the kids to material that shows sex as a respectable flow rather than an extreme fantasy.
jakobnissen
But kids (and adults) are exposed to all kinds of fantasies. War is not like Call of Duty. The Mafia is not like GTA. Monarchy is not like in the fairy tales. Romance is not like Twilight. BDSM is not like 50 Shades of Grey.
For all these things, we rely on people's world experience and common sense to figure it out. I think it's pretty obvious that sex is not like porn, and I don't understand why so many people are convinced that people can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality in this domain specifically.
jjcob
People can't tell the difference in any domain. People copy what they see. It's why James Bond stopped smoking in movies, and people smoke far less now.
Mainstream porn sites show a lot of weird practices (what's up with that strangulation fetish??) and I do think it has a bad influence.
I don't think age verification is a good solution, because we don't become immune to influence at age 18. Adults are just as vulnerable to copying poor behavior as minors.
I think we should do the opposite: Remove stigma associated with sexuality. Why can't more movies just include everyday sex scenes? Why do we need to make this distinction where you need to go to a different site if you want to see something more explicit than a nipple? Most people probably wouldn't even go to porn sites if they could just watch something steamy on Netflix.
jolmg
> Adults are just as vulnerable to copying poor behavior as minors.
Adults can be vulnerable, but I don't think just as vulnerable. Youngsters with no initial idea of how a given thing works have nothing with which to compare and contrast and potentially reject the first idea presented to them. Generally, the younger, the more impressionable.
> Remove stigma associated with sexuality. [...] Most people probably wouldn't even go to porn sites if they could just watch something steamy on Netflix.
I do agree with loosening the stigma. If there are parents that are giving their children unrestricted access to the internet, and those children may expose things to others that have better parental controls, then the straightforward solution is to have some form of earlier sex-ed. Doesn't need to cover everything, but enough to prepare them against the bad influences they'll apparently encounter. "Something steamy on Netflix" may be a positive counterexample to help them reject nonsense fantasies on porn sites.
high_na_euv
>. It's why James Bond stopped smoking in movies, and people smoke far less now.
Lol what, what makes you think it was caused by James Bond, not countless other anti smoking initiatives?
Al-Khwarizmi
It's different. One big part of the reason has already been said in sibling comments: taboo. Kids know that the huge jumps in martial arts movies are impossible because they jump when they play, they have seen their friends and classmates jump, they probably have tried flying kicks when playing so they get an idea of where the limits are. Nothing of this happens with sex, plus often they aren't exposed to anyone talking about it, except of course in porn.
The other part is the huge insecurities people have in this domain. You will meet a lot of people who aren't afraid to tell you that they dance like crap, or have no musical ear, or are in bad shape, etc.; but even if you meet people who talk about sex, no one is going to tell you that they last one minute in bed.
Cthulhu_
Taboo exactly; I will freely talk with colleagues and friends about e.g. GTA or action movies; watching movies and playing games is a communal and public thing.
But nobody talks about what they do in the bedroom; nobody goes to a movie theater to watch porn, people are awkward when there's sex scenes in films (and mainstream films have stopped having them altogether it seems), teenagers run away if their parents ever broach the subject, etcetera.
maccard
We shouldn’t be giving 6 year olds access to call of duty or GTA either. PEGI ratings (although overzealous) are a god starting point. I wouldn’t withhold an average 10 year old from a 12 rated game, but I wouldn’t give them access to an 18+.
Also, we (usually) talk about these things - video games are not the only source of discourse of violence or conflict, but sex is such a taboo topic that it’s highly likely most or all of someone’s knowledge will come from what they’ve learned on the internet
DrillShopper
> PEGI ratings (although overzealous) are a god starting point.
PEGI says FIFA Ultimate Team: Parental Wallet Draining is PEGI 3. Maybe PEGI should clean its house before we defer to it.
Aeolun
> I would like to see a honest discussion about the impact of porn on kids, I cannot really imagine that it doesn't distort the view and expectations on sex.
Only if they have no other exposure to this pretty damn normal thing. If all the adults in their life refuse to talk about because of some misplaced idea it is shameful, where are they going to get that info?
Not saying that’s the case for you, just that it’s the impression I get from many people.
_mu
What is really missing is good sex education in schools, especially public schools - and in particular in the United States. The state of sex education in America actually deserves the work deplorable, it's so bad.
Looking at this comment thread, I get the sense that people are coming from vastly different backgrounds and upbringings. There's no baseline established for what people are trying to discuss.
There are a lot of topics that should simply be explained to children up front from a very early age. When a topic is not shrouded in mystery, it becomes boring. So kids should learn from an early age what is sex, puberty, menstruation, homosexuality, etc. and it should be presented in a manner-of-fact way that takes the emotional charge out of the picture. When people are educated, they have more latitude to make good decisions.
Retric
> I would like to see a honest discussion about the impact of porn on kids, I cannot really imagine that it doesn't distort the view and expectations on sex.
There’s a bunch of studies on this and at the individual level it seems to do a bunch of stuff, but at the population level it has at most an effect so small it can’t be measured. Which IMO suggests causation goes in the other direction. IE if you’re entering puberty early you may seek both porn and sex at a younger age.
That said, I’m not an expert and have only briefly looked through the literature.
Hizonner
> In my 20s I was promiscious and lived what I saw in pornography, only later in life I learned about normal sex.
News flash. That is normal in your 20s and always has been.
antonymoose
Only for the last few decades, this has almost always been a taboo across all of humanity, this high level promiscuity you speak of. Hardly a normative experience across space and time.
Hizonner
Well, OK, that's true. I was wrong with "always".
It's only been the norm since we've had effective birth control, decent pregnancy and early-life health care, cures for most serious STDs, the notion that neither women nor children are property, what would nowadays seem like a reasonable amount of individual physical and social mobility and independence, certain knowledge of paternity, a less inheritance-based economic system where certainty of paternity isn't as overwhelmingly important anyway, and whatever else I'm forgetting.
But those are the new normal. Or at least one may hope they'll stay normal. And they've definitely been more or less normal throughout the lifetimes of anybody who's in this forum.
const_cast
It only really became taboo due to religion and the associated oppression of women.
Humans, for the vast majority of the time they existed, were largely free range. Lots and lots of sex. I assure you, hunter gatherers were not monogamous suburbanites who attended their white Christian church.
happymellon
Why don't they do things that are within their control.
Such as mandatory site filtering options. So the same place you pay your bill, you can also set which sites you want to be blocked by an "admin" password.
Or are they afraid that people will add tracking.facebook.com to the block list?
The chances of the kids stealing the admin password are about as likely as the kids stealing your age verification password that you needed to set up to access Reddit.
blitzar
Parents dont want to be the "bad guy" or parents in any real sense.
edu
I think it's more the case that many parents are not tech savvy enough to even know that's possible or how to do it. Also, this create a safety net which seems too fragile, as you just need one family that doesn't do it to potentially expose all their friends.
gorgoiler
And as another commenter points out, this also requires parents to unionize and enforce blocks together. (”Block en bloc” if you will.) Otherwise Timmy just uses Johnny’s phone to watch XXX videos.
I’m not arguing for either side, just pointing out a reality of the situation.
stevenicr
I too have wondered why there has not been huge pressure from parents to demand that cell phone hardware and the cell companies (and cable companies) - offer a portal they can log into and choose a 'bouncer / blocking system'
I have suggested publicly in the past that there should be a set of community blocker bots that are transparent about what they do and do not block and they are easy to fork and change for this sort of thing. And parents can choose which level of blocking their networks adhere to.
Of course they could just block all things sex for the moment -
But parents have not demanded this.
I imagine that way back in the day when if the porn via cable boxes was enabled by default, many parents would not have chosen to just give their kids one in the living room and one in their bedroom, many houses put one in every room of the house.
And yet they know that these phone devices can bring up porn and many worse things - and they just hand them over with an unlimited data plan like its nothing.
Many years ago, some parents could argue they did not know there was naughty things on the telephone like connected to the computers, but today's parents grew up with the porn on the internet and most partents just give them unlimited anytime access to all the things.
If the zealots riling up the churches and mom groups and such truly believe that porn is proven scientifically destruction to the children, why are the parents not in trouble for giving these devices to the kids? Like giving a car and alcohol and unlimited ammo to what 90% of kids?
I do believe part of the problem has been non-great options for blocking. (I have heard there are more options today than there were when I researched this a bit 10 years ago - back then disney circle (too expensive) and an open source dns poisoning thing I couldn't figure out how to setup)
But I think we also need to be honest that all parents know the porn is there (and worse, they know they have cameras on these devices and things like snap have been around so long everyone knows there are worse things that can be done with these devices) - and yet people have not demanded non-camera, all adult blocked devices, in fact they have been buying them up and paying premium prices to provide unlimited 24/7 access.
So the few people who are getting their ego stroked by the choir for saving the children, it would seem being in their bubbling is preventing them from seeing the reality of the people's choices, and providing better alternatives and education.
It seems every year each group needs a boogie man to raise money and get the likes and shares before campaign season. It's a shame they are willing to slay the rights of people just to get some temporary popularity - and likely knowing it's not going to fix the thing, but it is going to cost time and money for many - but they don't care about the masses.
anal_reactor
> I would like to see a honest discussion about the impact of porn on kids, I cannot really imagine that it doesn't distort the view and expectations on sex.
Honestly I'm really surprised that the generation that grew up on free access to internet porn and turned out fine is suddenly acting so prudish. As a kid I really believed that when my generation grows up, we'll be "the cool parents".
Of course porn distorted my view of sex, but let's be real - this damage is absolutely nothing compared to American family movies where a family of four with one adopted token black kid has a minor issue and then resolves it and everyone lives happily everafter. Those sold me the fantasy that as an adult I'd have lots of friends and a loving family and a satisfying job, and when none of that happened, I spent years feeling deep disappointment, which I still haven't processed.
Meanwhile hardcore porn I watched... look, that's the absolute least of issues I had as a kid. Growing up gay in a conservative country never gave me a chance to learn about proper relationships, I was immediately pushed into the underground world of hookups with shady people. Not to mention the plethora of other, unrelated issues, like constant bullying at school which nobody gave a fuck about, abusive parents, or ghetto community promoting criminal lifestyle. Or thinking even larger: what about whole generation that enters job market into recession, what about whole generation that will never build capital because they're trapped in a cycle of poverty, what about the constant fear that WW3 might be happening, what about social connections dissolving and people becoming more and more aggressive towards each other.
But those are difficult problems to tackle, so let's focus on kids seeing a naked titty instead. For sure that's a great use of our limited time.
edu
But I think a big difference is that while the current parent generation grow up with free access to internet, our access was limited usually to the family computer.
For us internet access was a bit of a ritual—find a computer and got some privacy. Or you could risk getting caught at the computer lab.
Now, the internet is ubiquitous and many kids have access to connected devices all the time (computers, tablets, smartphones) and it's harder to overview their use.
Also, the amount of content and extreme content available has exploded.
anal_reactor
But I think a big difference is that while the current parent generation grow up with family computers, our access was limited usually to porn magazines. For us magazines were a bit of a ritual—find one and got some privacy. Or you could risk getting caught at the library.
Now, the internet is ubiquitous and many kids have access to connected devices at their homes (computers, landline phones) and it's harder to overview their use.
Also, the amount of content and extreme content available has exploded.
---
I leave as an exercise for the reader to one-up this argument regarding the introduction of porn magazines themselves, porn drawings once paper became a commodity, as so on, dating all the way back to the first human sculpture (fat woman with giant boobs).
michaelt
> I would like to see a honest discussion about the impact of porn on kids, I cannot really imagine that it doesn't distort the view and expectations on sex.
It's extremely difficult to get solid evidence of this stuff, as it all happens so slowly it's inseparable from many other gradual forces in society.
Are people getting married and having children less, because porn has undermined their ability to form healthy adult relationships?
Or is it because of a successful campaign against teen pregnancy? A rise in women's education levels making them want to wait to start a family? Contraception and pre-marital sex removing a major incentive to settle down? Society's infantilisation of men, who should put away childish things at a much younger age? A housing crisis and hollowing out of the lower middle class meaning people can't hope to afford a family home until middle age? A preference the man out-earns the woman being incompatible with a world where women out-perform men in education? Fears about the future, like the climate crisis? A decline in religion and traditional family values? The rise of online/app-based dating?
Our main tools for disentangling these influences are, as far as I can tell, vibes and anecdotes.
freestingo
A completely absurd and clearly biased article trying to defend the impossible. Age verification is somehow supposed to be bad for online porn content providers (even though it is already mandatory for real-world porn content providers, for obvious reasons) because... it would hurt their profits and is not 100% effective. Child labour laws also severely hurt company profits and are not 100% effective; so much so that companies choose to delocalize production plants in the opposite part of the world, just to be able to continue exploiting workers. I guess child labour laws are bad too, and must be stopped.
My favourite and most out-of-touch part of the article was the one in which they argue it is "a fallacy" to think pornography can be harmful to teenagers because "research into pornography’s impact on children is limited and inconclusive — prompting calls for further study". I actually laughed out loud at this part
Hizonner
If it were a serious problem, even very limited research wouldn't be "inconclusive". Actually important problems have big, obvious, indisputable effects. That's why they're important.
IshKebab
Why did you laugh out loud? It's clear that it doesn't have large impacts on children - otherwise no research would be needed to know this, in the same way we don't really need research to know that over-use of alcohol fuels violence. If there's a small effect then we do need research to show it and that's extremely difficult to do and as far as I know nobody has.
Same deal as violent video games. What's your view on those?
BriggyDwiggs42
I definitely don’t wanna take it with more than a grain of salt, but they raise good points I think. For example, the idea it’s only enforced on big players so people will just go to shadier sites sounds like an issue IF it’s true. So it sounds more like it would be like 10% effective at keeping kids off porn.
classified
Could you please point us to credible sources about how online porn is supposed to be harmful to teenagers, beyond “If they knew I'm watching this, they'd laugh at me”?
As for the bad article, it's AI-generated slop.
IAmBroom
You're misreading freestingo. They didn't claim it was harmful; the article did.
txrx0000
It's much easier to implement user-configurable client-side filters at the application and OS level than censor the entire Internet.
But of course that's not what it's about.
Online age verification and content moderation was never about protecting anyone. It's about controlling the masses and tricking them into believing that it's for their own good.
edu
I agree that client-side filters would be a great solution, but I see two issues there:
1) Not everybody would know how to do it 2) This creates a weakest link problem, where in a class of say 15 kids, just having one with a non-blocked device would allow for all to see.
I don't know what would be good solution, maybe something intermediate... for example, filtering at the ISP level and making it mandatory for them to inform and request the settings for all their customers? Just a form, so they can block it. But then, maybe I want to block porn for my underage kids but not for me or my partner.
txrx0000
1) It's up to the parents to decide whether they want to put in the effort to look up how to use the parental control settings for their own child.
2) It's up to the child to decide who they want to associate with in school and in society, and up to the parents to advise their child in their decision-making.
Presumably, the parents are the ones buying the child's device, so this can be done at the OS level. The parent creates a user account for the child and a password-protected admin account for themselves on the new device, and only allow the firewall settings to be changed by the admin account. We can even implement offline on-device neural network-based detection and filtering, and you decide what to filter.
If the child is old enough to work and buy their own device, then it's debatable whether they should be moderated at all.
The problem with filtering at beyond the device level is widespread censorship, surveillance, and the erosion of the freedoms of the common man. The systems being built for supposedly the safety of the children are much too powerful that I can't help but question their true purpose.
chmod775
While I'll immediately believe their complaints about political shenanigans and publicity stunts going on in the EU commission, this post very obviously intentionally ignores good-faith efforts at building out privacy-preserving age verification using ZKP. They're laying into a strawman - with gusto - when they attack age verification methods that are objectively worse than the commission's best proposal.
It's hurting their own case by giving the EU commission the easiest retort imaginable. If you really don't want age verification, that's bad, because they usually get the last word in.
Better to respond in good faith to the commission's strongest possible argument, rather than do this, which is going to get brushed aside while handing them a win.
rpdillon
The laws are all being passed and ZKP is nothing more than a proof of concept. The laws are not being passed in good faith, and so I think it's a mistake to think that ZKP will ever be used. The only two systems I've heard of that have actually been deployed to comply with these laws are either face scanning or ID scanning. Neither one is acceptable, but the legislation is passing anyway.
LelouBil
I found out about this for zero knowledge profs that are able to be separated from the issued document.
https://github.com/microsoft/crescent-credentials
The demo I saw looked really interesting but I don't have the knowledge to say if the approach is viable or not
g-b-r
Privacy-preserving good-faith efforts requiring a Google/Apple account and a phone passing Play Integrity (or an iPhone)
botanical76
Can you provide more context on this?
mindslight
They might be "good faith" in terms of the relationship between corpos and government, but they most certainly are not good faith in the relationship between corpos and individual software freedom. One can't simply sprinkle ZKP faerie dust and obtain any desired security properties. These systems simply cannot provide the claimed security properties without relying on treacherous computing that prevents individuals from running the software of their choosing on their own devices.
nine_k
How about the scam of lawmaking disconnected from reality :(
Introducing laws that are going to be relatively trivially circumvented, which do not provide the protection they purport to provide, and which burden citizens with rather useless but onerous duties, should be called out as a failure at lawmaking. I think the best defense against such laws is to show thoroughly why and how bad and useless such laws are, so that large enough political constituencies (that is, us, citizens) would become interested in fixing or repealing them, and would vote accordingly.
UrMomsRobotLovr
This age verification stuff is really poorly designed by law makers. That said, the article points out the number of free VPN services with ad blockers are a problem. Couldn’t they run their own free VPN services that enables access and keeps the ads?
Seems like porn VPN would be popular.
decimalenough
No, because law-abiding companies can't offer tools to circumvent the law.
As the article says, all this means is that law-abiding porn sites (that, for example, respond to requests to delete CSAM and revenge porn) will go bankrupt and everybody will be driven to sketchypron.xxx instead.
delusional
> law-abiding porn sites will go bankrupt
How would that work? Can PornHub not exist without the "lucrative" market of children watching porn?
Meneth
More like, they can't exist without the lucrative market of the 90% of current customers who will refuse age verification and go elsewhere.
IAmBroom
So radar detectors for cars don't exist?
decimalenough
They're not sold by car companies, and they're illegal in many countries.
cpa
I got the French version and was really confused, since it randomly mentioned autonomous vehicles on the page. Turns out, Age Verification = AV = Autonomous Vehicle.
That's why you do quality control on AI-generated content :^)
null
freddie_mercury
So the argument is that, even though age verification is required for this line of business in the real world, online it shouldn't be required because their ad-supported model won't be profitable?
BriggyDwiggs42
They argue it won’t work and will hurt people more than it helps.
lp0_on_fire
Bars and Casinos argued the exact same thing when we mandated they check the IDs of a patron before serving them a drink. The world didn't stop spinning.
BriggyDwiggs42
But the law applied to almost all bars because it’s more enforceable. I don’t mean to white knight for the porn company but I think it’s a good point.
ipaddr
You don't need a license to write santa why should you on facebook?
g-b-r
Or because of privacy?
Hizonner
"This line of business" no longer exists in the "real world".
precommunicator
Most important part:
> Device-level parental controls have existed for years, and can actually block a million sites. But politicians can’t take credit for them.
ngruhn
Google can probably infer what I had for breakfast from the way I move the cursor. Can't we have ID-less age verification somehow? Sure, it won't be 100% accurate but keeping out 90% of the kids is a win.
kcrwfrd_
They should just do something like have parental controls that can configure the user agent with the user’s age, and require adult websites to not serve underage users.
It wouldn’t deter kids if you want to let them have unsupervised root access to a computer (like I enjoyed when I was 12), but I think it would be fairly effective for a walled garden like an iPhone
Freak_NL
Already possible! Banks know who you are, so what if there was a safe way to let a site know that you are over 18 — and nothing more than that — through some common API?
This was exactly what the German public transport service Mopla did when I registered an account there. It needed to know my name to be able to sell me the personal Deutschlandticket. To verify my identity their web application forwarded me to list of countries, where I selected the Netherlands, and then my bank from the list there. That forwarded me to my bank's digital environment, with the request to share my name with Mopla (and just that one attribute). I then used my bank's auth system to approve sharing that claim.
Simple, transparent, and at no point did Mopla have to do anything with ID cards or AI or whatever.
I would expect systems like this to become more broadly available in the near future. In the EU for sure.
octo888
No, let's not encourage Google and the rest of the ad industry
modernerd
Google launched ID-less age approximation in July in the US:
https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/age-assurance...
jolmg
> Age verification: If we incorrectly estimate a user to be under 18, the user has the option to correct their age, including by uploading a photo of their government ID or a selfie.
Hopefully false positives won't be set high and this abused as an excuse to obtain sensitive personal information on their users.
UncleMeat
And kids rapidly realized that watching a few videos on taxes would bump them into the adult category.
ngruhn
Amazing, that's exactly what I had in mind.
danaris
We do.
It has a terrible false positive and false negative rate.
So it's not just a matter of it "keeping out 90% of the kids"; it's a matter of it decreeing that due to unknowable factors, and with no ability to appeal to a human, you are 13, and are no longer allowed to access large chunks of the internet.
jolmg
> usually, us and Pornhub
Who's "us"? This blog doesn't seem to have an About Us.
jeanloolz
Did not know neither and reseatched. Us = xvideos.com the 2nd largest porn site.
classified
An AI slop generator isn't strictly part of any "Us".
The choice citizens have now is between an 'internet licence' (submit ID's to myriad sites), or an 'internet tax' (VPN).
Super annoying!
Given Australia doesn't even require Age Verification on porn sites (only on social media sites), the incentives hint this was strongly supported by legacy media (90% of Aussie media is owned by two companies, Newscorp and Nine Entertainment).
The internet licence will make it difficult for both authors and readers on alternative media platforms. And it will outright prohibit young people from getting information from non-permitted sources (of course, legacy sources are not affected - incidentally, they're probably more harmful than the prohibited sources). (I've long said, to try to think clearly after watching 'the news' is akin to trying to operate heavy machinery after consuming alcohol).