“Won’t someone think of the poor children?” they say, clutching their pearls as they enact another stupid law that will harm the privacy of every adult on Earth and create Prior Restraint that inhibits the freedom of speech in liberal democracies.
If you’re totally ignorant of how things work, the proposal of “verifying you’re an adult” before you access adult content sounds, superficially, like a reasonable thing to do. But it’s a patently stupid idea at every level.
Age Verification Makes The Internet Less Secure
In meatspace, if you wanted to go to the adult section of a movie store, you would need to show a clerk your government issued photo ID. They would check that your date of birth was before (current date – 18 years), and if so, they would admit you. This is the sort of experience that people who do not understand technology use to build an intuition for how laws like this operate.
The Internet is not like meatspace. When you supply your government ID to a website in order to verify your identity, at least two of the following security and privacy risks introduced at once:
The website stores your credential (whether by design or by hacker intervention). The mechanism websites use to prove that the credential is authentic could track who is visiting which adult website in order to build a profile for your tastes and interests for marketing and/or blackmail purposes. Your device (phone, computer, etc.) could have malware installed that pilfers whatever credential you provided in order to e.g. commit identity theft.
That’s a lot of risk for the public to take on. But what are they getting in exchange for it?
Well, a lot fewer adults will choose to share their photo ID to look at pornography, which will likely increase sexual aggression since pornography use by adults inversely correlates with sexual assault in every society science has observed.
(…) the increasing availability of pornography appears to be associated with a decline in rape.
Part of this is deliberate: The anti-porn lobby is largely christofascists and they’re all following the same playbook as the authors of Project 2025. Y’know, the same clowns that want to ban sex education.
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