But the thing is, there are ways that don’t involve handing over your ID to porn sites.

“I have this great idea but I’m gonna execute it terribly and infringe on your rights” is a classic excuse

The people who want to take away your privacy use these tactics to make it feel OK because it’s “for a good cause”. You fell for it.

Showing your ID at the store and sending a copy of your ID to an entity that will most likely not have the best cybersecurity are very different things.

Sure, many people are concerned about what you mentioned. But plenty of them are concerned that the idea that you have to give personally identifiable information to these companies is what’s the worst thing about these laws.

You sound an awful lot like a boot licker.

This is generally not the reason why people are against age verification laws. They’re against it because.

1. Kids can find porn anyway, and they’ll just end up on shadier sites not regulated by your government.
2. The potential for abuse for censorship, privacy violations, etc. is very high. This is already happening in the U.K. with an ID needed to view footage of police arresting protestors.

Porn is different for many reasons, chief among them being that the age verification laws don’t actually keep kids from accessing it. On top of that, porn is something that most people are embarrassed about accessing for a wide variety of reasons, and for them any requirement that they make available proof that they did so is equivalent to a legal ban on accessing that perfectly legal material.

Also I’m pretty sure this is the wrong community to be having this conversation.

I don’t agree children shouldn’t be watching porn. I started being exposed to it around 10 years old and I’m fine. The real issue is having the proper support structures in place. These involve confronting children’s burgeoning sexual impulses and treating them with respect, rather than trying to “preserve innocence” or “protect” them from “sin” or “indecency.” The people most concerned with protecting children from the indecency of pornography are typically the more depraved of our society anyway. As usual, the issue is more preparing children for adult topics rather than protecting them from them.

It IS the parent’s sole responsibility. It’s not a perfect world is not an excuse to pass parental responsibility on others, nor is it an excuse to invade the privacy and usage of others.

But we don’t live in a perfect world in many parents are absolute garbage. Many have absolutely zero technological literacy and when it comes to the parental controls that are in place, many of them are wonky or break or absolute crap and prone to failure.

So instead of making laws that mandate companies make these features better/easier/etc… we should make the internet significantly worse and more dangerous for the other 75% of the planet?

I have a split-brain DNS system. My young kids are whitelisted to specific school related sites and games that I choose. I NAT rewrite ALL outgoing DNS queries so it hits only my DNS server. And I block all known DoH and other “secure” DNS services. It wouldn’t be hard for an ISP or router manufacturer to setup a system like that, put some polish on it and tie it into their ISP app that they make people install these days. It could be a one click solution. I’m thinking a pop-up from the ISP app when a new device joins the network “What type of device is this?” if they click child apply all the blocks that the parent configured that they want to have block for their kids when they setup the service/router. Hell none of it even needs to call a mothership even. Can pull the same pihole lists that people already generate for this shit.

Force the companies to provide the solutions for parents to use if they want to. That’s the better answer. Not to mandate age gates everywhere that won’t work anyway.

Some porn sites were already age gated in that you needed a credit card to access… that shit never worked either. Regardless of the system the government forces, the better answer will always be to give parents more tools with lower thresholds of knowledge to use the tool.

So, your approach is authoritarian. Let’s just ban everything we don’t want to happen. Problem is that doesn’t ever work. Kids will learn tech better than you and will get around every wall you try to put up. Instead, parents can build trust with their kids so the kids will come to them when they inevitably see horrible stuff. You don’t have to venture to the dark corners of the web to find horrible stuff kids shouldn’t see; it’s available on any front page.

If we can agree that children shouldn’t see beatings, torture, and murder, then sure.

I honestly don’t care if kids watch porn.

Fuck no, I don’t agree with that at all. People mature at different rates, and the main reason IMO not to show sexual content to very little kids is that they literally don’t have the capability to understand it having not yet hit puberty. If you’re old enough to be interested in sexuality, you’re old enough that you’re going to start trying to explore it… and it’s a hell of a lot safer to explore it through media than through doing things IRL. I don’t think there’s anything particularly harmful about a ~13+ year old searching for boobs or dicks if they’re interested and want to see them; I did it myself. I may have gotten a few weird ideas about sex from seeing porn online when I was a teenager – that took me a couple years to sort through while growing up – but I never got an STD or got anyone pregnant from looking at porn!

I reached the point of being interested in sexuality around 9th grade – and I seemed to be on the late side compared to my peers based on things I heard from them in 7th and 8th grade. As far as I can recall, the first time I encountered something explicitly sexual was in a novel I found at a library when I was in 6th grade; I was more traumatized by the taboo around sexuality than anything in the book itself (which was a fairly tame sexual fantasy that the main character had involving comparing a girl’s breasts to fruit of various sizes, IIRC). I was not ready for that content yet, and that led to me having a formative conversation with my dad about the subject – i.e. it was ultimately a positive experience for me growing up, even though I was briefly uncomfortable for a bit while I was going through it. When I was a teenager, I was ready to deal with it and sought it out on my own. Speaking as someone who grew up in the goatse/lemonparty/tubgirl era of the internet, if I ran into something that was too extreme, I backed off and said “yeah, that ain’t for me!” I don’t think I would’ve turned out better if I’d been locked out of it.

“Shouldn’t,” you say? Sure - I agree with that. They also shouldn’t swear, ride a bike without a helmet, hit a friend, eat candy, or stay up all night playing video games. But they’re going to, and there’s only so much you can do before the “fix” becomes worse than the problem.

Most of us did those things as kids and we mostly turned out fine. The world’s a messy place and it always will be. This is just yet another moral panic that’ll just create further problems rather than solving them.

If they wanna try to verify my age, they can just check the age of my Google account. I made my Google account back in 2004, my account alone is old enough to drink alcohol.

I respect the intent of ‘protect the kids’ and all, but they shouldn’t need anymore information from me, the age of my account alone proves I’m old enough. Also, I don’t have any kids.