Technology

The conflict that this often boils down to is that the digital world does not emulate the real world. If you want to buy porn in the real world, you need ID, but online anything goes. I love my online anonymity just as much as everybody else, but we’ll eventually need to find some hybrid approach.

The problem is that because the internet is fundamentally different from the real world, it has its own challenges that make some of the things we do in the real world unfeasible in the digital world. showing an ID to a clerk at a store doesn't transmit your sensitive information over the internet to/through an unknown list of companies, who may or may not store it for an undetermined amount of time, but doing so on the internet essentially has to do so.

While I do think we should try and prevent kids from viewing porn at young ages, a lot of the mechanisms proposed to do so are either not possible, cause many other harms by their existence that could outweigh their benefits, or are trivially bypassed.

We already scan our faces on our phones all the time, or scan our finger on our computer. How about when you want to access a porn site you have to type in a password or do some biometric credential?

Those systems are fundamentally different, even though the interaction is the same, so implementing them in places like porn sites carries entirely different implications.

For example, (and I'm oversimplifying a bit here for time's sake) a biometric scan on your phone is just comparing the scan it takes each time with the hash (a processed version) of your original biometric scan during setup. If they match, the phone unlocks.

This verification process does nothing to verify if you're a given age, just that your face/fingerprint is the same as during setup. It also never has to transmit or store your biometrics to another company. It's always on-device.

Age verification online for something like porn is much more complex. When you're verifying a user, you have to verify:

• The general location the user lives in (to determine which laws you must comply with, if not for the type of verification, then for the data retention and security, and access)
• The age of the user
• The reality of the user (e.g. a camera held up to a YouTube video shouldn't verify as if the person is the one in the video)
• The uniqueness of the user (e.g. that this isn't someone re-licensing the same clip of their face to be replayed directly into the camera feed, allowing any number of people to verify using the same face)
• And depending on the local regulations, the identity of the user (e.g. name, and sometimes other identifiers like address, email, phone number, SSN, etc)

This all carries immense challenges. It's fundamentally incompatible with user privacy. Any step in this process could involve processing data about someone that could allow for:

• Blackmail/extortion
• Data breaches that allow access to other services the person has an account on
• Being added to spam marketing lists
• Heavily targeted advertising based on sexual preference
• Government registries that could be used to target opponents

This also doesn't include the fact that most of these can simply be bypassed by anyone willing to put in even a little effort. If you can buy an ID or SSN online for less than a dollar, you'll definitely be able to buy an age verification scan video, or a photo of an ID.

Plus, for those unwilling to directly bypass measures on the major sites, then if only the sites that actually fear government enforcement implement these measures, then people will simply go to the less regulated sites.

In fact, this is a well documented trend, that whenever censorship of any media happens, porn or otherwise, viewership simply moves to noncompliant services. And of course, these services can be hosting much worse content than the larger, relatively regulatory-compliant businesses, such as CSAM, gore, nonconsensual recordings, etc.