Pornhub blocks Montana and North Carolina as their age verification laws take effect | The website says the states’ ID requirement would put users’ privacy at risk::Montana and North Carolina are the latest to join the list of states with age verification laws for adult platforms.
While care is required, designing a system that only proves that someone is over a specific age is possible without leaking much additional information.
For example a request for age verification can be generated and signed by the porn site. All it needs is a unique ID and the signature. It should expire quickly and can only be used once.
The person identifying themself can send this request to a certifying party (the government in the EU where we trust governments, or I guess some terrible for profit company in the USA because they privatize everyday). The certifying party can sign the request, since they know how old the person is.
The person then returns this verification to the porn site.
In this scenario the porn site never learns anything about the user other than that they are above a given age. The certifying party only knows that the person has gotten an age verification, but not why or where.
There is still possible collusion between the porn site and the verifying party, but in that case the system is not really needed at all. Also metadata tracking is possible (like when a person gets a request and has network traffic to a porn site), but can be mitigated if a user is concerned.
oh fuck off with this shit
watch your own fucking kids
Do you watch your children every minute they are online? Poor kids!
not my job to raise your kids, neither is it strangers on the net
Bruh you really just reinvented tracking cookies
Did I? I’m not sure how. The person visiting would only use the verification request once. It’s only good for a single request. How could this be used for tracking?
You didn’t… If anything you’ve described something closer to OAuth or JWT. You’re just getting hit by people who don’t know how cookies actually work.
I’m not nearly as afraid of a porn site having information about people as I am about governments having a list of who watches porn on what sites
The problem is that if a porn site has the information they can be compelled to pass that information on, or it can be revealed by data breaches.