Pornhub blocks access in Mississippi and Virginia over age verification laws
theverge.com
Pornhub has shut off access in Mississippi and Virginia to protest age verification laws that can involve checking government IDs. It previously blocked access in Utah.
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I came around the idea of stricter enforcement of age verification for online services. But the way it is implemented doesn't make any sense. I wouldn't trust porn sites with any personal information of mine.
I like the idea France is working on, a double anonymity age verification service. A third-party (hopefully the government) is used to verify your age and generate a token and that token can be used on any site to verify your age. The site verifying your age doesn't know for which service you are generating the token and the site doesn't have any access to personal data.
Whether or not pornographic material should be accessible to people under the age of 18 is another topic. I am not sure what a good age cut-off would be. But I definitely agree that there should be an age limit.
Doesn't the (government?) site that provided the token learn which site it was for when that site requested the token be verified?
@Hillock
No, if done correctly the site verifying the token should only need to verify it was signed by the authority token provider.
Right now the system is still just theoretical so the specifics are undefined. But the idea is that they wouldn't. I assume they could still figure it out by tracking the IP addresses of those who access the token and matching it to a company. But the company doesn't have to send a request. I assume you are just generating a link that says "This person is age X". So the link itself serves as the verification. The link would only be valid for 5-15 minutes, so you can't just steal it to impersonate someone else.