I continue to think these anti-pornography laws are backwards, puritanical, and hopefully, unconstitutional. But I also continue to believe that we should have operating system-level age verification and standard browser APIs for accessing that data.
@jsonbecker I largely agree. But I wonder what unintended consequences I’m not thinking of for such a system-level age verification would be.
@jarrod well, the reason I’d put it on device is because I think that makes this “no big deal”. There’s already the electronic driver’s license/ID standard, though not as widely adopted as it should be. You could use that same standard to have device storage of identification and an OS-level API that just answers “Is age greater than #?” and nothing else. It exposes no data off device other than meeting an age threshold and does not create widespread targets with deeply sensitive private information for hackers to get.
@jsonbecker I like that approach. I think I just feel…I dunno…melancholy at the idea of further locking down the Internet against kids. There are legitimate reasons, for sure. But I also kinda think we lose opportunity to teach trust between people when we offload it to devices. And trust is at the center of everything. A book can’t verify my age, and I read plenty of those that were “inappropriate for my age”. But I don’t regret the person I am for reading them when I did… I think it’s the nuance that gets lost that makes me a bit uncomfortable.
@jarrod as someone who had HBO in his bedroom from age 4 on, I completely agree that all of this is nonsense. But I think if laws are going to exist, I hope they are enforced in ways that are privacy preserving, and this is the best pathway there. I feel like there’s a whole separate thing going on with payment processing– it’s basically impossible to pay for pornography without revealing your identity to a site because of how payment processing and credit cards work. I wonder if a lot of that could be dramatically reduced by having device-driven age verification. We are doing lots of weird halfway things to enforce “decency” over privacy.