the problem with porn ID laws
a lot of politicians sure have been weirdly obsessed with pornography lately, haven't they? all across the USA, various state and federal legislators have pushed proposals to require age verification in order to access pornography, and in a few states they've even managed to put them into effect.
but what are these "Porn ID" laws doing, anyways, and are they even actually protecting anyone?
as a case study, i'll be taking a look at this section from Virginia's recently adopted Porn ID law.
Any commercial entity that knowingly or intentionally publishes or distributes material harmful to minors on the Internet from a website that contains a substantial portion of such material shall, through the use of (i) a commercially available database that is regularly used by businesses or governmental entities for the purpose of age and identity verification or (ii) another commercially reasonable method of age and identity verification, verify that any person attempting to access such material harmful to minors is 18 years of age or older.
now, you might not know this — as clearly the people who wrote this law didn't — but this "commercially available database" does not exist. there simply isn't any sort of company that provides a service to verify if someone is an adult or not for the purpose of allowing them to consume online pornography. for the longest time, online porn has just relied on age gates as a "reasonable" way to verify someone's age. sure, it's easy for a teenager to lie about being an adult, but they're the one who lied, and they know what they're getting into anyways.
so, okay. there currently isn't any reasonable way to verify someone's age online with 100% certainty. what if we tried to change that?
first, we'd have to figure out who's actually going to do the verification to begin with. is each individual porn site supposed to do it? is there just one company doing it? or the government? if it was every site doing it on their own, it would be unlikely that each one of them would actually be protecting user data very well. and with a juicy source of data for blackmail, hackers would be surely trying to get all of those logs of who was an adult and what porn they're into. a single private company wouldn't be much better, as they'd likely sell the information directly to the highest bidder for whatever they might want to do with it. just imagine the potential in targeting ads to someone's fetishes they're most ashamed of!
so that leaves us with having the government doing it. now, i don't know if i have to explain this to you, but giving the government a list of what pornography every single person is into, even if indirectly, just sounds like the kind of information that's begging to be abused. if a politician wanted to go after anyone who was gay or trans, they could easily go after everyone who's looking at gay or trans porn. not to mention whatever Republicans have against furries nowadays…
of course, all of this assumes that simply checking someone's ID card actually would work. what if teenagers just grab mom or dad's ID card for a minute to unlock all the porn they want?
the real question boils down to why we even want to do this in the first place.
with a classic age gate, anyone who goes to look at porn is given a warning first. so, anyone who's looking at it knows exactly what they're getting into. as a website owner, you hope that everyone clicking past the gate is being honest about being an adult, but your primary concern is that nobody's getting flashed with porn they don't want to see.
porn addiction is a problem. but is a kid getting addicted to porn the fault of a porn website? is it the fault of the government? i don't think so. i think it's the fault of parents, who ought to be watching over their kids more instead of just slapping them in front of a computer and ignoring them.