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)

  • balsoft@lemmy.ml
    0·
    2 days 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.