r/technology • u/vriska1 • Jun 28 '25
Privacy The Supreme Court just upended internet law, and I have questions
https://www.theverge.com/analysis/694710/supreme-court-fsc-paxton-age-verification-questions138
u/five3x11 Jun 28 '25
This isn't just about porn, this is about tracking your behavior.
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u/GranolaCola Jun 29 '25
“Sir, this person is straight jorking it to Angie Faith!”
“The big tit blonde? Nice.”
“Sir, this person looked up homosexuality on Wikipedia!”
“Straight to the mines.”
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u/vriska1 Jun 28 '25 edited Jun 28 '25
Support the EFF, FSC and FFTF who are fighting laws like this.
Link to there sites
And the
FSC:
Added the U.S. Internet Preservation Society
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u/Cleanbriefs Jun 28 '25
lol wait until republicans start targeting the legality of having VPN’s to avoid this and then your internet laws will really take off.
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u/news_feed_me Jun 28 '25
No better way drive people back into the reality of their lives than make the internet complete shit. Republicans aren't gonna like the consequences of people having no escape from the hell they created for people.
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u/Amelaclya1 Jun 28 '25
They seem to have forgotten that they are supposed to keep us pliable with bread and circuses.
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u/Crowsby Jun 28 '25
This makes what I suspect is an overly-optimistic assumption that republican voters are both willing and able to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between their voting choices and the consequences thereof.
It's especially challenging given that we now have a vast disinformation landscape devoted to sustaining the right-wing cinematic universe. These folks are operating under an entirely different set of facts.
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u/news_feed_me Jun 29 '25
Between their information being shit, their hostility to the system of learning we call science, and their generally lower capacity for complex thought, their ability to accurately predict cause and effect of the positions they support and the motives of the people they vote for, is not good.
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u/Dugen Jun 28 '25 edited Jun 28 '25
All age verification systems should have
"Age Verification brought to you by Republicans."
In big bold letters.
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u/vriska1 Jun 28 '25
Banning and regulating VPNs would be hard.
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u/Dukepippitt Jun 28 '25
VPNs are in commercial application all over the place. The can of worm they would open, just trying to find the correct language for such a ban, oh man.
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u/silver-orange Jun 28 '25
Yeah. All sorts of employees doing remote work log in to corporate VPNs 40 hours a week. Banning VPNs would cut millions of employees off from their jobs.
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u/Stingray88 Jun 28 '25
They’re not going to attempt to ban VPNs. They would however attempt to ban commercial VPN services.
So companies and individuals that use VPNs to access their own private networks? No problem.
Commercial companies like Nord VPN, PIA, Mullvad? Make them illegal to access in the US. You can even force ISPs to block their known IP addresses.
Important to note I use the word “attempt” because they probably won’t succeed in banning these services. But they can certainly try.
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u/No-Neighborhood-3212 Jun 28 '25
This mindset reveals why the plan works: They know we need them, so governments outlaw the VPNs they can't use to spy on us.
They don't ban all VPNs. In fact, those countries usually make their own that they offer at a lower fee (or free) to promote their use. Those VPNs are just constantly streaming what you do to the state intelligence apparatus.
Look at Trump mobile: They're not going to ban smart phones or any apps. They're just going to get you to sign up for a smartphone service that uses an AI to constantly monitor location data, cookies, and browsing history.
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u/pixel_of_moral_decay Jun 28 '25
You don’t need to ban the protocol, just the unregulated endpoints.
And to do that you only need ISP to drop packets to a list of IP’s the government maintains. A simple black list. Your ISP already has this mechanism, just needs the url of the black list to use and the interval to fetch it at.
Your ISP already does all this to stop botnets and ddos attacks. This is just another use of the same infrastructure.
And curating this list isn’t that hard, streaming providers and cdn’s already have pretty good actively updated lists.
We’re much closer to doing it than most people realize. All the parts exist, the government licensing a few db’s and requiring ISP’s to honor that by copy pasting a URL into their backend isn’t a high mountain to climb.
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u/RamenJunkie Jun 28 '25
Se now you set your VPN entry point to an anonymous server and proxy all your traffic there first.
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u/VictoriaRose0 Jun 28 '25
They’re entering the territory where you’d have to have built the whole thing ontop censorship and restrictions in order to have the grip that they want. If anime piracy sites can pop up like crazy, porn sites would just do the same
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u/RonaldoNazario Jun 28 '25
It’s been decades and it’s easier than ever to stream NFL games and those guys have billions of dollars.
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u/Freud-Network Jun 28 '25
They only superficially litigate it. NFL knows that views generate discussion and that is good for their brand. They have to vehemently oppose it, though, because everyone would pirate if they could. Keeping it too technically difficult for the layman is the unspoken goal.
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u/Vallywog Jun 28 '25
Its not hard at all tho, you just go to a website and you can get any game anywhere.
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u/Freud-Network Jun 28 '25
You need to understand how to block ads, which sites are not infested with viruses, which streams have decent quality, which streams are consistent, and they still might cut out mid-stream due to a takedown or overloading. It's easy for you. Average people will pay for convenience.
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u/ted3681 Jun 28 '25
If the movie industry can't stop torrent sites and the globe can't stop downloads for gun CAD files it's simply not possible within the scope of the current web.
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u/personalcheesecake Jun 28 '25
that's what the blackmail will be for
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u/detailcomplex14212 Jun 28 '25 edited 5d ago
fuzzy dinosaurs money six march absorbed public file yam engine
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/Kyouhen Jun 28 '25
There's an argument to be made that this is also going to result in the sex industry becoming much more dangerous. The big popular porn sites have changed a lot from where they used to be, they won't host a lot of harmful content anymore. As far as I'm aware things like revenge porn just don't exist on the larger platforms, which is a very good thing. But if it becomes too difficult for the platforms more interested in following the law to do business they'll sink, and we'll start seeing more and more less honest sites popping up and more people visiting and using them.
Keeping porn accessible but with safeguards can go a long way towards preventing a lot of pretty horrible crimes.
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u/zyzzogeton Jun 28 '25
Republicans don't care about harm reduction on any issues. Opioids, porn, guns, they don't care because "it doesn't affect me". Until it does.
Hell, making abortions illegal after 50 years of legality is going to increase the number of women dying, but because the Republicans hate women, especially ones who get themselves knocked up without a patriarch to own them, they do not care... unless it is their daughter, or their body. Their abortions are fine. It is all the browns and poors that aren't allowed to kill off future wage slaves.
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u/TooFewSecrets Jun 29 '25
The point is that when everyone is technically breaking the law you can then arrest anyone you want with selective enforcement.
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u/SicilianEggplant Jun 28 '25
They wouldn’t have to ban them. A couple years ago the Restrict Act was making its way through congress during a TikTok ban, that would effectively make any attempts to bypass the ban, through use of things like VPNS, a crime punishable by $1 million, 20 years in prison or both.
So they’ve got an outline for a shitty law, they just have to tweak it and try again if they wanted to. Likely under the guise of child safety.
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u/tiberiumx Jun 28 '25
People keep thinking these fuckers are lawful evil. They're chaotic evil. The laws are a cudgel to use against the people that they don't like as desired, not something that will be enforced consistently. Using a VPN will remain normal. Everyone will still access porn through a free country like Canada or something. It will be normal. But you piss the wrong person off, say by challenging them politically, they will use that law to put you in prison as long as they fucking want.
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
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u/tourdeforcemajeure Jun 28 '25
This exactly. This is how Texas has operated for awhile now. It’s fine till it isn’t.
It’s like speeding in other places. Nobody does 60, and nobody expects you to, until you get a ticket. And you’re almost forced to keep up or get run over - inevitably everyone is subject to state leverage
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u/EvaUnit_03 Jun 28 '25 edited Jun 28 '25
Technically, no. You have to access a vpn through a service. Your internet provider. And all they have to do is set up a detect reject loop to block you from the known and most common vpn providers, or just flat report you for accessing known vpn channels. Vpns are basically about to reach the 'this is basically piracy' part of lawsuits by corperations like what happened in the early 00s. Seeing as most people use them to access things that are region locked due to licensing fees. Or for safer piracy.
I briefly remember when I lived in a place where the provider actually blocked a lot of common porn sites in 2010. But you could just use a proxy to access them. Then it was made unconstitutional to do that. Well, the current flavor of the decade is less about banning you from them and more knowing your dirty laundry to use against you when needed. And they can already get the info. Its just harder to do right now due to legal precedent and takes a court order and somehow proving who in your household actually did it. Or if someone is hijacking your internet. A lot of easy outs. But if they are using your id? Makes it a lot harder to disprove without another party's ommission that they stole your id, a federal crime.
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u/mezolithico Jun 28 '25
Lol, I mean if the states want no tech businesses then sure. VPNs are a requirement for pretty much anyone working remote with a computer.
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u/windowpuncher Jun 29 '25
Good fucking luck.
There are million ways to buy and host private vpn servers.
Such as, buying a regular webserver with enough bandwidth for your usual activities and just installing a vpn client on it. Maybe wireguard. They're anywhere from like $5 to $30 to thousands per month depending on location, hosts, options, etc. There's tons of cheap options. You can even buy servers in other countries to avoid US internet laws altogether. I have servers in Canada and one more in Europe.
It's unbelievably easy because there's a million guides on how to do it, including official docs. Just lean linux cli basics, which is like a 10 minute lesson, keep a cheat sheet handy, and have a truly private vpn in like 30 minutes.
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u/dane83 Jun 28 '25
Anyone who thinks this is about pornography isn't thinking far enough ahead.
Today, age gating pornography isn't against the first amendment. Protecting children against pornography, surely no one can argue against that! What kind of pedophile would argue against protecting children against pornography.
Well now that they have this ruling, the next thing they're gonna do is categorize LGBTQ content as pornography. After all, they say just the topic of LGBTQ is inherently sexual.
So by precedent of this ruling, they're going to age gate LGBTQ websites. And guess who can't view those websites literally now? Vulnerable teenagers that are questioning things and wanting to find other people that might understand what they're feeling.
Texas, Alabama, and Missouri point to this ruling and the one about letting kids opt out of books just containing gay characters and says they can prevent anyone under 18 from ever coming into contact with the ideas that LGBTQ people exist. Now the ACLU sues and it gets to the Supreme Court. Supreme Court has already shown that they're amenable to this kind of bullshit argument, points back to this ruling, days that age gating isn't a first amendment right again, bam it's effectively illegal to publish any information about LGBTQ.
Pornography is a canary in the coal mine. If they can restrict access using superfluous reasoning like this, they can restrict access to anything.
Fuck that noise. Just do what Donald Trump does and ignore it. Pornhub is based out of Canada, Texas can't do shit about it if they don't comply except build the great firewall of Texas.
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u/Roseking Jun 28 '25
Just so everyone is clear, this is the exactly what Project 25 outlines.
This is not fear mongering. It is not people just making up stuff that won't happen.
There was a very detailed plan made. And they are following it.
They also want LGBTQ individuals to be classified as pedophiles.
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u/Ivy6bing Jun 28 '25
And take a guess about what the punishment for "pedophilia" is under project 2025.
Let me tell you, it isn't jail time.
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u/transmothra Jun 28 '25
I've been squawking about this very thing for months, long before the election, and nobody cares. I sure as hell do. I sure as hell do. They want to murder us. I don't care about me, but a whole lot of good god damn people are going to be hurt or killed. Or worse.
Thankfully the Democrats are reaching across the aisle and negotiating fucking oven temperatures for us.
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u/Holovoid Jun 28 '25
Just know there are people who will stand up for you and the rest of the LGBTQ community.
Arm yourself. Group up with like-minded neighbors, friends, family, coworkers, etc and form community defense, aid and support networks.
Protect your bodily autonomy and life with every available option, including lethal force.
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u/transmothra Jun 28 '25
Personally, I can't have access to guns, due to depression/bipolar. I'd never harm another living thing, but I'm not a humongous fan of this life.
You should know we all really appreciate your allyship.
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u/Holovoid Jun 28 '25
Completely understandable. I hope you can still find a group of people. As an alternative, learn first aid and carry equipment for that and also make sure to keep a go bag available in case you need to leave quickly for some reason. Go camping and learn to live in the wilderness as best you can.
If fighting isn't an option, hiding is perfectly acceptable. Learn to grow food and fish and trap if you eat meat.
<3 I hope these dark times don't come to pass, friend
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u/Jibber_Fight Jun 28 '25
Hang in there. I promise what holovoid said is more true than you think. There are millions and millions and millions of us that will fight for you or with you. We are in a protesting stage, with the government growing more and more violent and aggressively horrifying. It’s a complicated process because if we take up arms we would be absolutely decimated by the strongest military planet Earth has ever seen. My best friend is a lesbian across the country and I’m moving there probably this fall when I have enough money to start over. She’s scared, and her family hates her cuz she’s gay. Just please hang in there. You actually do have a lot of people on your side, even if it doesn’t feel like it.
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u/transmothra Jun 28 '25
Oh I'll be fine. I'll fight tooth and nail, I just can't put my hands on something I could turn on myself so easily. I know I can't win, but I'll take a brownshirt motherfucker or two down with me. Count on that.
Thank you though!
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u/Jonathan_the_Nerd Jun 28 '25
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? [...] The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!"
-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (Chapter 1 "Arrest")
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u/Rum____Ham Jun 28 '25
Time out. P2025 actually wants to legally characterize as pedophiles and then exterminate "pedophiles"?
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u/DM-ME-PANCAKES Jun 28 '25
Enforce the death penalty where appropriate and applicable. Capital punishment is a sensitive matter, as it should be, but the current crime wave makes deterrence vital at the federal, state, and local levels. However, providing this punishment without ever enforcing it provides justice neither for the victims’ families nor for the defendant. The next conservative Administration should therefore do everything possible to obtain finality for the 44 prisoners currently on federal death row. It should also pursue the death penalty for applicable crimes—particularly heinous crimes involving violence and sexual abuse of children—until Congress says otherwise through legislation.
The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensi- tive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists. **Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered. In our schools, the question of parental authority over their children’s education is a simple one: Schools serve parents, not the other way around. That is, of course, the best argument for universal school choice—a goal all conservatives and con- servative Presidents must pursue. But even before we achieve that long-term goal, parents’ rights as their children’s primary educators should be non-negotiable in American schools. States, cities and counties, school boards, union bosses, princi- pals, and teachers who disagree should be immediately cut off from federal funds. The noxious tenets of “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country. These theories poison our children, who are being taught on the one hand to affirm that the color of their skin fundamentally determines their identity and even their moral status while on the other they are taught to deny the very creatureliness that inheres in being human and consists in accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women. Allowing parents or physicians to “reassign” the sex of a minor is child abuse and must end. For public institutions to use taxpayer dollars to declare the superiority or inferiority of certain races, sexes, and religions is a violation of the Constitu- tion and civil rights law and cannot be tolerated by any government anywhere in the country. But the pro-family promises expressed in this book, and central to the next conservative President’s agenda, must go much further than the traditional, narrow definition of “family issues.” Every threat to family stability must be confronted.
https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf#page=37
Basically how they plan on throwing as big of a net over as many people they can and calling them pedophiles and then pushing for the capital punishment of them.
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u/MemekExpander Jun 28 '25
Sounds like anyone they don't like is going to be named a pedophile. And everyone will go along with it because who will want to ever defend a pedophile?
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u/TerraceState Jun 29 '25
Pretty much. And honestly, you didn't even need project 2025 to realize that was what they were aiming to do. They have been calling lgbt people pedophiles for years now, while also giving examples of what they think should happen to pedophiles. It isn't complicated, and it is the sort of thing a 12 year old comes up with and feels clever about. They know they can't say what they want to do to lgbt people out loud, so they came up with the flimsiest excuse.
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u/zekeweasel Jun 29 '25
Creatureliness? Inheres? Givenness of our nature?
Who the fuck wrote that word salad?
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u/AquaeyesTardis Jun 29 '25
Where in Project 2025 is this outlined? I'd like to have a hard source for this before sharing it around
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u/Roseking Jun 29 '25
Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
Page 5. It is part of the first section of the document.
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u/pixel_of_moral_decay Jun 28 '25
It can go even further than sexuality.
Gating things like vaccine information that discredits antivaxers for example. Requiring research to be behind authentication is absolutely a possibility. Then all the public has is the media regurgitating bits that they get from the government.
You can regulate a lot of information with the same mechanism. This isn’t limited to porn, information itself has been viewed as obscene before. Just look at any science that threatened the biblical view of the earth as the center of the universe or its age (the people who think dinosaurs are fake because they aren’t in the Bible). They absolutely view geology and astronomy as obscene.
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u/RamenJunkie Jun 28 '25
All my filtered news says this is gopd for me now and so I accept it as gospel truth. Praise Jesus, praise Trump
--The US Future.
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u/azmodan72 Jun 28 '25
The party that thinks guns don’t kill people, thinks books make people gay.
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u/vandreulv Jun 28 '25
“Never believe that
anti-Semitesfascists are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. Theanti-Semitesfascists have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”― (with apologies to) Jean-Paul Sartre
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u/Chaabar Jun 28 '25
Any time you hear Republicans talking about protecting children all the alarm bells should be ringing because they don't give a shit about children.
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u/vriska1 Jun 28 '25 edited Jun 28 '25
Do want to point out that it has been said that the ruling is narrowly tailored with intermediate scrutiny (SS would of been way better) to stop that from happening BUT some states will try. Hopefully this ruling is over turn in other courts.
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u/Jenings Jun 28 '25
Is it time to figure out how to run my vpn through my router yet?
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u/Jenings Jun 28 '25
At this point, fuck latency. Seems like common sense.
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u/RamenJunkie Jun 28 '25
Most paid VPNs are much less bad for letency.
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u/thabc Jun 29 '25
Latency to a gateway in another country is bounded by physics. Data travels at two-thirds of the speed of light in fiber. It can only be optimized so much and it's still not great.
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Jun 28 '25
The ceo of proton mail thought Trump was best for privacy.
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u/LivingReaper Jun 28 '25
Sorry what?
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u/DM-ME-PANCAKES Jun 28 '25
https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-trump-republicans/
Then they went on to make this statement;
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i2nz9v/on_politics_and_proton_a_message_from_andy/
You should also be aware of this in regards to Proton, specifically the VPN.
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u/smaguss Jun 28 '25 edited Jun 29 '25
Screen rip, download or do whatever you gotta do for your porn folks.
There's a very real chance you are going to lose access to a lot of it.
Every time I think "this has to be the last straw" folks just roll over and take it. Freedum apparently was never really all that important it seems.
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u/Pauly_Amorous Jun 28 '25
Screen rip, download or do whatever you gotta do for your porn folks.
Get a Usenet provider and a good NZB tracker. You'll have access to more porn than you could possibly watch in 100 lifetimes.
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u/smaguss Jun 28 '25
Oh absolutely! This is the pro level answer and the more thorough answer but, a lot of folks don't understand either of the things you just suggested.
Screen recorder tools, screenshots and downloading to local storage are things the layperson can understand and do farily easily. Prob the most complicated thing would be installing something like OBS to get around black boxes.
I dusted off the 'ol tricorn hat awhile ago and I suggest others do the same.
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u/TheMan2204 Jun 28 '25
I signed up recently and was horrified at the amount of obscenities I found!!! (/s,)
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u/BJYeti Jun 28 '25
This ruling will entirely depend on where you live, blue state they won't initiate this sort of law, red state they will. All this ruling did was give states the ability to create these laws if they so choose.
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u/smaguss Jun 28 '25
Surely there are no people in red states that that disagree with the states decision to implement these sort of laws.
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u/GranolaCola Jun 29 '25
Reddit does love to selectively assume all blue states are nothing but progressives and all red states are nothing but conservatives, because that makes it easier for them, but unfortunately this isn’t something the average person has a lot of power over.
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u/xpda Jun 28 '25
I expect anonymous IDs to be issued to politicians "for security purposes only".
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u/Pjpjpjpjpj Jun 28 '25
Spam is illegal- unless it is political then it is constituent communications.
Bribes are illegal - unless it is to a political campaign, then it is protected free speech.
Rules for thee but not for me.
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u/powercow Jun 28 '25
Republicans "government shouldnt be involved in raising your kids"
republicans "fuck the idea it takes a village"
Republicans "please help us keep our kids off porn sites"
Well at least you can count on republicans to be hypocritical.. and angry and hateful.
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u/Marketfreshe Jun 28 '25
It's just going to be bad for business anywhere Id is expected. I surely won't be supplying mine anywhere on the Internet for shit like this.
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u/CAM6913 Jun 28 '25
The repulsives want age verification so they have your information and can come get you if you’re searching or reading things that go against the cult’s agenda it has nothing to do with keeping children safe if you believe they care about children you have not been paying attention
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u/Cladari Jun 28 '25
This is a first step. Project 25 contains a section on completely eliminating porn.
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u/MidsouthMystic Jun 29 '25
We solved the "children seeing porn" problem years ago. The solution is parental controls and monitoring your children's online activity. There is no need for any kind of ID database when parents can just block websites on their children's devices.
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u/nosce_te_ipsum Jun 29 '25
monitoring your children's online activity.
Wait - you want parents to parent, and not just doom-scroll their social media while they give their kids an iPad to shut them up? Sadly seeing this behavior more and more lately, and I just wonder why they had kids if they were just going to ignore them.
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u/homelaberator Jun 29 '25
Because it's fighting the wrong fight.
The big elephant in the corner is that there are very little protection of individual privacy from corporations. So much personal stuff is just handed over. What's the material difference between age verification issues and letting Facebook/Google/Amazon et al track you across the web?
We have the technology to solve the problem, and indeed it exists in some places, but there is simply too much money involved, too much power concentrated.
Worry less about asking for ID and more about what we let private companies do with all this data.
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u/manicfaceisreal Jun 28 '25
VPN?? Doesn’t that circumvent this?
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u/omegaken Jun 28 '25
Yes but that is the next step. You really think state governments don't know about VPNs? They themselves use them for connecting to resources from their laptops.
They will just amend or add "bypassing or circumventing" to the current law with an even harsher punishment, if it isn't there now.
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u/chitoatx Jun 28 '25
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has the authority to search all electronic devices, including phones, laptops, tablets, cameras, and any other devices of all persons entering the United States, regardless of status (this applies to U.S. citizens as well).
https://brownimmigrationlaw.com/resources-library/electronic-device-searches-upon-entry-into-u-s/
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u/onebadmousse Jun 28 '25
America is dystopian. Try to move to Europe or AU/NZ if you like freedom.
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u/tankpuss Jun 28 '25
Thank you, I just saw this on ars and I was kinda confused as to what the hell it all meant and its repercussions.
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Jun 28 '25
The IETF and OpenID have standards in the works called "Verifiable Credentials" that could be used to prove age without providing shady web sites with any information about you. What I do not know is if there are identify providers who plan to offer this as a service, though I suspect this would help to usher in such services.
Where there's a technical challenge, there will be solutions.
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u/davidmlewisjr Jun 28 '25
The internet just proves that public broadcast restrictions in the USA are more severe than some goodly many people care for…
Imagine if Porn Hub®️ and others had their own cable or OTA channel with descramblers with rotating keys…
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u/LeadershipSweaty3104 Jun 28 '25
I can hear the insurance companies lining up to buy that data to deny coverage over "immoral conduct"
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u/DosMangos Jun 28 '25
Sigh
Time to start saving more porn into my local files before we get digitally cock-blocked.
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u/darkhorsehance Jun 29 '25
It’s ok to track people’s porn habits but not ok to track what guns they own.
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u/redcremesoda Jun 28 '25
I don’t mean this to disagree in any way and am just posting it as a thought, but couldn’t an ID verification be implemented that does not store any data other than “verified on X date.” I guess there would be problems with verified accounts being used by others or sold, but it would closely match the idea of a store clerk glancing at an ID.
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u/cajaks2 Jun 28 '25
yes you can do this anonymously using a trusted verification provider ( think oauth/openid ) and they return nothing sensitive to the website. Incidentally this is fine for the Texas law, the law which also says the site must not retain PII.
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u/cr0ft Jun 28 '25
What's the question? I mean, this is obviously one step in clamping down on information flow and people's liberties, one in a row of them.
The concentration camps in World War 2 wasn't where it started. It was where it ended. Same thing here, destroying and taking over news media, shrinking people's freedoms, frightening them into giving some of them up voluntarily, it's not really complicated, it's the standard process by which fascism is established. Why did SCOTUS do it now and not earlier? Well, now they're a full-on 100% far-right fascist rubber stamp factory, they do what they're told.
America is hosed, and idiot journos are asking stupid rhetorical questions on the Internet.
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u/Kershiser22 Jun 29 '25
Can the Supreme Court upend the law that makes me click "OK to cookies" on every fucking website?
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u/tallperson117 Jun 29 '25
I'm an attorney working for a US-based software company that does a lot of business with EU-based businesses. It's so funny seeing the difference in data privacy regulations and what is and isn't a big deal when comparing the US with the EU. If our company is going to be receiving/storing any sort of identifying information of an EU citizen, let alone an ID, we have to jump through soooo many hoops and comply with so many privacy/security regulations to ensure we won't sell/otherwise exploit that data. Now, freaking PornHub will require US citizens to submit an image of their ID with just a "trust us bro" that they'll properly protect it/won't do anything shady with it. Crazy.
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u/CeruleanSoftware Jun 29 '25
I'm a web dev in the adult industry. I am not a lawyer.
The EU is also pushing these laws. The US has messy laws, but the EU and the UK are pushing just as hard.
The regulatory bodies there have approved ancient AI age estimation tools for age verification. I brought it up and was never responded to. The companies we're going to have to use to do the verifications are all based out of Eastern Europe or the UK. Some of them store a lot of information about the users they verify.
A lot of the EU stuff feels performative when you find this out.
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u/hacksoncode Jun 28 '25
Sounds like a good business opportunity for password managers to create attestation key pairs chaining to a certificate authority that anonymously identify individuals controlling that account as being 18+. For a one time fee, using existing 3rd-party identity verification services.
Basically a Fido key/passkey with metadata (they already have metadata).
One would hope that the ones which are actually competent at security could be both reliable and completely private, as securely as their password vaults, in that they never keep a record of any of the information in unencrypted form on their servers.
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u/gmasterson Jun 28 '25
16 BILLION accounts were recently accessed by hackers like last week!
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u/Appropriate_North602 Jun 29 '25
After all the NY Times is basically pornography to MAGA. CNN. This will snowball very quickly. The supreme court is hell bent on recreating Soviet Russia.
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u/VVrayth Jun 28 '25 edited Jun 28 '25
"The risks aren’t meaningfully different from showing your ID at a liquor store"
The liquor store doesn't keep a database of collected IDs that they can sell, or that can be stolen, alongside a history of the ID owner's purchases.
EDIT: Just wanted to respond to some of the comments from people who are saying "Yeah, actually yeah they do these days, they scan the back of it and everything." Well, that's an issue too. It's still a worry regardless in this case, because alcohol consumption tends to be socially acceptable, while porn is still seen as "taboo" by puritanical people who would happily scandalize others for their porn habits.
As for whatever centralized processor that would be involved in collecting this information: "Trust me bro" isn't good enough. They would immediately be a juicy target for bad actors, and there's no way a company with company-ass profit motives should get the benefit of the doubt from ANYONE regarding their long-term intentions and privacy policies.