US States enforcing new age verification for adult content—how could this be done properly?
Seeing the news about Utah and Virginia over in the US, there’s been a lot of discourse about how unsafe it is to submit government ID online. Even the states that have their own age-verification portals are likely to introduce a lot of risk of leaks, phishing, and identity theft.
My interest, however, focused on this as an interesting technical and legislative problem. How _could_ a government impose age-verification control in a better way?
My first thought would be to legislate the inclusion of some sort of ISP-level middleware. Any time a user tried to access a site on the government provided list of adult content, they’d need to simply authenticate with their ISP web credentials.
Parents could give their children access to the internet at home or via cellular networks knowing this would block access to adult content and adults without children could login to their ISP portal and opt-out of this feature.
As much as I think these types of blocks aren’t particularly effective—kids will pretty quickly figure out how to use a VPN—I think a scheme like mine would be at least _as effective_ as the one the governments have mandated without adding any new risk to users.
What do you all think? Are any of you from these states or other regions where some sort of age-restriction is enforced? How does this work where you are from?
Edit:
Using a simple captive portal—just like the ones on public wifi—would probably be the simplest way to accomplish this. It’s relatively low friction to the end-user, most web browsers will deal with the redirect cleanly despite the TLS cert issues, and it requires no collection of any new PII.
Also, I don’t think these types of filters are useful or worth legislating, I’m just looking at ways to implement them without harming security or privacy.
There’s no good way to do this without that information being available somewhere we don’t want it for privacy reasons. You shouldn’t trust a company with your information any more(or less) than the government.
Stop trying to be a nanny state, if people want to view porn, let them. If kids try to view porn, that’s up to the parents to manage.
It’s the US republicans who want to do this, not me, I’m just approaching this as an interesting problem.
As for my suggested solution, the only database would be the list of sites with adult content. No new personal data would be stored about individuals.
I’m not suggesting that ISPs implement photo-ID checks, just a login with your ISP username/password (an account you already have).
The ISP suggestion simply doesn’t work. ISPs would then know who is browsing what within a family, far too big of a privacy problem. It’s already bad enough that they can see and track everyone’s browsing.
On top of that, it doesn’t deal at all with multi-user devices like a family PC. Kid could just jump on and watch porn after dad/mom finishes because it’s not going to ask for a login every single time or then you’ll actually be tracking which adults are using porn specifically.
This problem is always approached from the wrong angle (requiring verification of adults to view adult material) instead of the more freedom- and privacy-preserving method of requiring child-friendly sites to advertise to the browser that they are suitable for child web browsers.
What I mean by this, and the way that I would solve this problem, is to introduce an HTTP header such as
X-Child-Friendly: trueorX-Content-Rating: Eand to put the onus on parents to set the child’s web browser to only allow browsing sites which return this header. Every browser would need to have a “Parental Control” mode that restricts browsing to sites that return this header, but this could easily become a standard. Instead of having every adult site implement your legislative controls, now you just need child-friendly sites to add a header to their responses.The whitelist approach is less likely to allow adult sites to slip through the net, compared to the blacklist approach.
For those who say that children would find a way around this by installing a different browser or unlocking the parental controls: it should be the responsibility of parents to monitor their child’s access to the internet and installation of software. The current approach of trying to enforce age-verification on adult sites just shifts the problem to other adult sites that are not under the jurisdiction of the legislation.
Forcing age-verification for adults also has a huge bureaucratic cost and potential for abuse and loss of privacy. I think we know why legislators prefer this approach, and it isn’t to protect the children.
There’s already an answer to that. My state (and several others) have digital IDs that exist. I have an app on my phone called mID (<state> Mobile ID). I can present proof of just my age to a bartender using the app. They don’t see my address, birthday, DLnumber… nothing… Just that I’m indeed 21+.
I can present a qr barcode that will grant someone the ability to see my ID… I can choose what information to send by default… and if someone is requesting more information I can view/approve if I choose to.
There’s no reason why a simple request to this platform couldn’t do it. I have the other side of the app that let’s me read other people’s qr codes and validate whatever information I “need” to validate. If I can do it as an individual… I don’t see why website’s couldn’t.
Now… Do I want the state to particularly know that “BustySluts.com” wants to view my id? I can see this being intrusive… but there’s already answers like charging 1 penny to a credit card as well.
I would wholeheartedly be against my ISP doing anything other than being a carrier for my data. The ISP wouldn’t be able to tell if I’m on my computer or if my child is anyway. Middleware or not.
I don’t really like all these anti-porn laws. If kids want porn, there are too many leaky buckets they can drink from. Hell, they could just messages pics and videos to each other.
That said, if we are forced to do strong verification, the best I can think of is some sort of mix of the ideas we use for certificate authorities and oauth.
Certificate authorities are really just trusted identity providers. In my solution, you would choose from a list of trusted identity providers. You provide them with all the private information necessary for them to validate your identity. From there a third party can validate information about you with your permission.
The way this workflow would work is similar to oauth workflows people are familiar with for Google, Facebook, and other single sign-on solutions. You go to a adult site, select your provider from a list of trusted identity providers, the adult site redirects you to the provider site, you log in and give the adult site the privilege to verify you are over 18. The browser redirects to the adult site. The adult site would get nothing else about you besides what identify provider you use and if you are over 18.
Now ultimately, you have to give your private details to someone but at least you don’t have to give it to everyone. Unfortunately, your provider could potentially keep track of what sites you are allowing to verify your information. We would need strict laws on these providers on what records they are allowed to keep.
I definitely agree that these types of blocking are ineffective and generally do more harm than good, but if governments are going to push for this stuff, it would be good to have a solution that doesn’t harm people’s security and privacy.
