EU parliament accepted a last minute amendment, mandating age verification for pornographic (whatever that is) content online, punishable with up to one year prison sentence.

This was rolled into a directive concerning CSAM. Because adults accessing porn need to be de-anonymised to avoid child exploitation?

Some press releases: (1), (2), (3)

  • JamesBoeing737MAX@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    Alternatively you could provide them with a genitalia pic (which they need to discard in limited time) and they verify your age that way or something (it’s a joke, don’t shit on me for it). How the fuck is age verification anonymous? Either the site gets your ID or the government issues a confirmation, which puts you on the porn viewer list.

      • onoira [they/them]@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        0·
        2 days ago

        a digital wallet with ZKP could resolve ‘are you old enough?’ without the query ever needing to leave your device.

        without a digital wallet, it could be done with fully homomorphic encryption.

        both of these would be innovations which i feel require guided development. innovation counter to the goal of the legislation, which is surveillance. innovation driven by the self-proclaimed purpose of ‘protecting children’; innovation driven by the impetus to make it harder for people to masturbate.

        since the general attitude right now has been ‘require agegates and just leave it up to The Market™’, then the solution in practise will probably be a private third party that brokers this information, probably with a natural monopoly, that will charge exorbitantly for their API, have Google Analytics running on every page, leaks like a sieve, leaves logs everywhere, and will probably get caught selling data, which will incur a one-time fee equal to 80% the size of the company’s rainy day fund, and maybe the CEO will be asked to step down, shielding the rest of the C-suite from consequences (and allowing them to just do it again). they’ll work closely with law enforcement, they’ll be breached in the first year, and probably have a huge leak 4 years later.

        in that time, due to real changes in the law or jurisprudence, or companies just ‘playing it safe’, age verification will come to encompass queer identity, sexual education and health, war coverage, counterculture and even history. more online regulation just means more barriers to entry which means a larger monopoly for multinational corporations.

        i think there are better uses for this technology than controlling pornography.

    • .Donuts@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      Either the site gets your ID or the government issues a confirmation, which puts you on the porn viewer list.

      I believe the idea (in an ideal world) is that Website A requests data from Service B, which then asks about you to government C. So Government C doesn’t know what you’re asking about, and the Website A doesn’t know who you are. That does mean Service B would have to be trusted / vetted, which might relocate the problem but it would be easier to verify (FOSS for example) than trusting your government to not put you on a list.

      • balsoft@lemmy.ml
        0·
        1 day ago

        There’s no need for the middleman in this scheme. Instead, a much simpler solution would be:

        1. Website A gives you a randomly generated $TOKEN
        2. You go to Government and ask it to sign something like The person with $TOKEN is of legal age. You have to provide your ID or whatever here, but the government doesn’t know who made the token.
        3. You go back to website A, it checks the signature of the message and lets you through

        This can be automated in some way; maybe with a browser extension or some referrer-less redirect sort of thing.

        It’s still fundamentally shitty though, because now the government pretty much knows that you want to watch adult stuff, it just doesn’t know which adult stuff exactly.

        A better (but almost impossible to implement) solution would be for the government to issue everyone a smartcard as an identity document (many countries already do, but without the following features). On that smartcard is a private key, with the corresponding public key signed by the government. The smartcard can then sign any $TOKEN with true statements about you, e.g. The person with $TOKEN is of legal age, or The person with $TOKEN is called $NAME, or The person with $TOKEN has a driving license, etc. You have to connect it to your computer in some way so the website can talk to it, but it should be trivially doable with almost any modern smartphone. This way, everyone has the ability to attest stuff about them without the government being directly involved.

        The reason this won’t work is because it would be quite expensive to do and would take a long while to implement.