As of this week, half of the states in the U.S. are under restrictive age verification laws that require adults to hand over their biometric and personal identification to access legal porn.
Missouri became the 25th state to enact its own age verification law on Sunday. As it’s done in multiple other states, Pornhub and its network of sister sites—some of the largest adult content platforms in the world—pulled service in Missouri, replacing their homepages with a video of performer Cherie DeVille speaking about the privacy risks and chilling effects of age verification.
Archive: http://archive.today/uZB13
Everyone who ever submits for age verification will have their information stolen. It is a matter of when, not if.
yeah I barely can bring myself to give like Fidelity or Charles Schwab photos of my ID, just even having a digital image of my ID on my computer feels wrong lol
I mean, a VPN is way cheaper than whatever hoops Idaho wants you to jump through to watch some 10/10 goth hottie get their ass eaten.
Yea, but soon we’ll have no states to vpn to, and we will have to start using the Quebec servers, then all the websites will be in French and I’ll have to learn a new language.
I’ve yet to see any state legislature take that proposal seriously. Unlike trying to make porn sites take your credit card info in advance (a policy they hated so much gosh darn it!) you’re really fucking with the money when you try and regulate VPNs. Also, just… not really that practical. For the same reason Congress has been pretty toothless when it comes to regulating Torrents and digital encryption, going after VPNs at the regulatory level is something of a technological rabbit hole.
Nothing will ever make anyone on the internet learn a language other than English.
snekerpimp meant if every state requires ID, then VPN to another state will not get around the ID check.
Setting aside the fact that there’s no appetite for these laws in liberal states because its purely a conservative fetish, you can still get porn on the internet without going to the big corporate online clearinghouses.
FFS, there was porn on Napster back in the day.
There’s no appetite for these laws in the voter public of any state, as far as I can tell given how VPN usage skyrockets in every state where these laws are put in place. Is California no longer liberal? Also consider the people running sites in any of the states that have such a law. They may resort to just blanket ID-checking everyone rather than risk prosecution.
Evangelical right-wing states have a huge contingent of politicians who compete with one another to be the toughest on “child sex trafficking” and other Epstein-tangential topics. So, in the GOP primary, you get a lot of promises about how you’re going to round up all the pedos and put them to the sword or whatever. And this inevitably manifests as “please insert your dick into this pepper grinder to access the pornography” laws, as a sort-of practical compromise.
Current Status: Failed (2024-08-15: In committee: Held under submission.)
Looks like they’re retaining their title. That said, if you peak under the “Supporters and Opponents” what you’re going to see in the Supporters section is a litany of right-wing evangelical organizations and a couple of mega-corps.
The current strategy appears to be refusing to host content in the regulated states. Even then, there are plenty of social media and general content distribution channels that dodge the regulation by claiming to be content-blind in how they serve their data. I don’t see Facebook or YouTube getting the business end of any of these regulations. Almost as though they’re toothless if you’ve got enough money to tip your Congresscritters.
I’d say rather than a compromise, the “protect the children!” porn bans are an excuse to go after LGBTQ content by marking any and all content related to them as explicit and demonizing them as pedophiles going after children. They don’t care who it hurts along the way.
Ironically? If we were a less prudish society this genuinely wouldn’t matter.
“Oh no! Sarah likes threesome porn. Uhm… okay?”
I don’t think that’s the main reason folks are concerned about having their government IDs stolen.
Yeah, people already browse porn with zero privacy precautions, so linking their fetishes to them would be trivial. The main concern is having yet another privacy vulnerability vector for identity theft.
And there are so many of those these days that a new one genuinely doesn’t matter.
If you haven’t been offered a free year of identity theft insurance recently? Some company/org is plugging their ears.
SSNs are a fundamentally broken system (look it up). Photo IDs? I will guarantee you that if you go to ANY city there is someone at the DMV who will look up whatever you want for fifty bucks. The ONLY reason credit card fraud is less massive than it is (and it is MASSIVE) is because the CC companies put in the effort to monitor that and lock it down.
EVERYONE should have their credit records locked unless they are actively applying for something.
No. the issue with these is that we live in an increasingly christofacist society where even looking at porn makes you Unclean. And if you look at the wrong porn? Off to the reeducation camps with you!
Um, having direct access to pull my government photo ID is a huge deal. Lots of online services require photo ID or other more in-depth verification to pull loans and stuff. So yes, this new vector IS a serious concern.
And paying someone $50 at any DMV? C’mon, man, that sounds like some unfounded bullshit. Hardly anyone is going to risk a cushy government job with solid benefits and great hours for fucking $50, let alone the potential risk of going to jail.