What if you had to show Government ID whenever you entered a grocery store, a library, a movie theater? What if you were tracked each time you consumed a video, a still image, an audio clip, or even a text message?<p>What if the government kept a record of any or all of those checks? What if they arranged for third parties to commercialize that data so they could 'legally' end-run any restriction on domestic spying with a small ad targeting data service fee?<p>This is the sort of dystopia that librarians and others focused on liberty have been fighting for what seems like forever.
How do sites that have porn but not their main purpose respond, or do they have to? Reddit and Twitter come to mind, I've stumbled across a lot of weird stuff on both.
Wow, this moronic bill passed nearly unanimously. It's nice to see bipartisanship on display in North Carolina when it comes to the stupidest ideas.<p>> Any commercial entity that knowingly and intentionally publishes or distributes material harmful to minors on the internet from a website that contains a substantial portion of such material shall...<p>That's a ridiculously vague standard. Google and Bing both distribute material harmful to minors in "substantial" quantities...<p>I hope it gets thrown out on judicial overview.
> Officials explained that companies will be able to use commercially available databases to verify that users are old enough to access their content. The new law will take effect starting January 1st.<p>ಠ_ಠ
What would the legal consequences be for PornHub if they ignored the law and didn't (and perhaps don't) have any physical or commercial presence in North Carolina, beyond the website being available?
From a political standpoint its sort of wild the bills principal sponsor --Amy Galey-- mentions absolutely nothing of it in her 2024 campaign site. You'd imagine championing child safety would be at the top of your list of achievements. nope. parenting and nutrition.<p><a href="https://amygaley.com/#issues" rel="nofollow">https://amygaley.com/#issues</a><p>this was clearly meant to be a political stunt leading into the 2024 election year to make the democratic governor Roy Cooper appear as though he didnt care about children. No respectable republican voter would ever dream of submitting to a government database for something like this.<p>Cooper called the bluff, as did most of the minority Democratic legislature in the house and senate. i doubt this law will survive past the second quarter of 2024.
This news article on a Fox affiliate site only mentions Pornhub. Did this originally link elsewhere?<p>edit: e621 is certainly doing this; this is from their front page right now:<p><i>Dec 31st: Due to the current legal situation in North Carolina and the uncertainty surrounding it, we will be blocking access to e621.net from North Carolina until we can consult with our legal counsel on this matter. We did not come to this decision lightly and we will do what we can, as we can, to rectify and remedy this situation so that we can restore access to those users that are affected by this matter. We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience and will have an update as soon as possible.</i>
Ignoring other (obvious) issues, it’ll be interesting to see how people respond.<p>Do they seek different entertainment?<p>Does it lead to more or less socially desirable/adjusted behavior?
I'm in Virginia and these sites are also being blocked. On Pornhub:<p>> As you may know, your elected officials in Virginia are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our...
It would only affect local businesses advertising on G-rated websites in porn-banned states if porn viewers in their state found it easier to just leave the VPN running all the time.<p>Is this a reasonable point?
><i>Officials explained that companies will be able to use commercially available databases to verify that users are old enough to access their content.</i><p>What?
Note that they do not object to age verification. They object to the specific way North Carolina is requiring it to be done:<p>> Aylo has publicly supported age verification of users for years, but we believe that any law to this effect must preserve user safety and privacy, and must effectively protect children from accessing content intended for adults.<p>> Unfortunately, the way many jurisdictions worldwide have chosen to implement age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous. Any regulations that require hundreds of thousands of adult sites to collect significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information is putting user safety in jeopardy. Moreover, as experience has demonstrated, unless properly enforced, users will simply access non-compliant sites or find other methods of evading these laws<p>Using modern cryptographic techniques (such as blind signatures or zero-knowledge proofs) it is possible to design a system whereby you can prove your age to porn site P without P receiving any information they did not already have other than that you are older than their age threshold. In particular this would even work for anonymous users.<p>There would be another site V involved in the verification. You would have to give V your real identity and show them your proof of age documents, but V would not get any information about what site you trying to get verified for.<p>If V were a site that already has your real identity then using V for age verification would not be giving them anything that they didn't already have.<p>It might be possible for someone who obtains records of both P and V to get an idea of the real identities of porn site account owners by trying to match up the timing. This risk can be greatly reduced by having just one or two V sites, so that they are high traffic, and by having some random delays in the verification protocol.<p>That way someone trying to figure out if I was using say Pornhub might find out from V that I was doing the V side of a verification at say 2024-06-01 01:44:21, and they might be able to find out from Pornhub if they had any verifications using V that started within a few minutes before that and completed within a few minutes after that.<p>But with only one or two V sites, there will be way more verifications that happened at V at times compatible with those Pornhub verifications. They would not be able to tell if mine at 2024-06-01 01:44:21 is one of those Pornhub ones or one of the many more going on around that time for other sites.<p>It is a little counterintuitive, but the more sites that require age verification the better the privacy protection, and the fewer the number of V sites, the better the privacy protection.<p>That suggests that if we are going to require some sites to do age verification, to do it in the most privacy preserving way (1) it should be done nationally rather than as a patchwork of state verification laws, and (2) V should be a government site.
To those opposing this, do you think porn is harmful to children? Porn is a digital drug, how else do you propose solving this problem? I'm a bit confused as to why someone would want children to have access to porn...