For Louisiana residents, 2023 got off to an Orwellian start as porn websites are now demanding drivers licenses.
Last month, we reported on the terrible news that age verification is now part of Bill C-11. It’s not much of an addition, and there isn’t much in the way of specifics either. Still, it means that age verification, however poorly implemented, is in the bill.
The text of the section in question states this:
“(r.1) online undertakings shall implement methods such as age-verification methods to prevent children from accessing programs on the Internet that are devoted to depicting, for a sexual purpose, explicit sexual activity;”
During the Senate hearings, no witnesses that we saw actually asked for this. Yet, here we are in 2023 with this amendment added anyway because of a moral panic driven agenda brought us here.
It’s difficult to really encapsulate just how bad the concept of age verification is in the first place. An example is that it demands that websites and services collect even more personal information on you. In an era where too many websites are collecting too much information about you, only to lose it all in a data leak or breach after, the last thing we need is laws demanding websites collect even more information on people. The privacy situation online, as it is, is a massive dumpster fire and age verification pours gasoline on the fire.
For those who don’t have a clue how bad the situation is when it comes to leaks and breaches, all you really need to do is type in “data breach” into a Google News search and note the publication date of each story. It’s just plain scary how common this all is and that’s just the breaches that get reported. It’s well know that there are countless breaches and leaks that go unreported. Just try not to slip into outright paranoia when you do see that, though. That is known to happen to people who discover the truth in this.
At any rate, no matter what system is put in place to enforce this, personal information is going to be required to be collected. That information will have to get stored somewhere because whenever a user logs in, that information has to be accessed on a regular basis. Whether this is through the website itself or a third party service, there is that constant flow of personal information to contend with.
What that information being demanded does vary. Whether it is facial recognition scans, credit cards, drivers licenses, or other bits of information that is deemed satisfactory, information collected will invariably lead back to the user using these websites. The overall effect is obvious: any database containing that information is going to be considered valuable.
Black hat hackers will see that value in inevitably seek to exploit that. More often then not, people like that really don’t care about the damage they inflict on people. To them, it’s just another dollar sign floating around in the ether. So, sooner or later, that information is going to be targeted. When a hack occurs, that information is going to be used to extract money from victims. Whether it is for identity theft purposes or, more likely, ransom purposes, black hat hackers are going to find ways of exploiting this information.
Information like that is going to be particularly sensitive. Whether hackers know what specific types of porn is being accessed to the user, or they simply know you accessed the website in general, that is going to be leverage any way you look at it. In the modern era, plenty of people put their real names and contacts publicly on social media. So, finding any additional information is going to invariably be a trivial thing to obtain. After that, it’s just a case of bad actors using this information to extract maximum value from victims.
This is just a couple of angles for why such a system is a bad idea from the very beginning. Yet, for those waging a war on pornography, the ends justify the means in their eyes and they will do everything in their power to make this happen no matter the consequences. For some pushing this law, being at the receiving end of a ransom might be all the more reason to punish people for the crime of being curious enough to look at some extra skin. Their lives got ruined? Well, they probably deserved it for seeking out this content in the first place. It’s unjustified, but that’s how some of them think.
Of course, for Canadians looking on in horror at the prospect of age verification being in Bill C-11 because it was shoehorned in at the last second, the question is, how would this whole system look in the first place? Well, they didn’t have to wait long because residents in Louisiana are now living in this Orwellian future today. A bill known as Act 440 was passed in the state, demanding age verification of any website that has at least 33.3% of their content be considered pornographic material. How that is measured was never even made clear, but that was probably petty little unimportant details.
Regardless, Act 440 went into force this year. From TechCrunch:
At the start of the year, a new law went into effect in Louisiana, which requires online publishers to conduct age verification checks if their site’s content is more than 33.3% pornography.
In accordance with this law, Pornhub now requires visitors to verify their age with the LA Wallet app, a digital wallet for Louisiana state drivers licenses. Other popular adult websites haven’t instituted age checks yet, according to Motherboard. But per the new law, porn sites can be sued for damages that result from a minor’s access to such content. TechCrunch reached out to Pornhub for comment.
“Due to advances in technology, the universal availability of the internet, and limited age verification requirements, minors are exposed to pornography earlier in age,” the legislation says. “Pornography contributes to the hyper-sexualization of teens and prepubescent children and may lead to low self-esteem, body image disorders, an increase in problematic sexual activity at younger ages, and increased desire among adolescents to engage in risky sexual behavior.”
A sex worker, professor, and research fellow at UCLA’s Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, Olivia Snow describes these age verification checks as part of a “sex panic.” Even though this legislation states that sites that conduct age verification cannot retain identifying information, Snow believes that porn consumers may still fear data breaches, which is a very valid concern.
The article also pointed to a tweet we’ve previously seen when researching this story:
https://twitter.com/fodderyfodder/status/1610014958942654471
It’s getting awfully surveillancey in here. Anyone in Louisiana accessing pornhub will now have to link their drivers license or government ID in order to access the site. Under his eye.
There are numerous other concerns about this. This might include personal information being stolen and used to access this material. For instance, a kid managing to scoop up a family members drivers license and using that to log on to such websites.
Then there is the fact that VPNs, the TOR network, and other anonymizing tools could easily be used to circumvent such restrictions. After all, if the website recognizes a Louisiana IP address and throws that reg wall up, then changing your location to someplace that doesn’t require the site to put up such a wall is trivial to do in this day and age.
Another question this raises is what happens when smaller sites simply don’t comply with this. Obviously, not every website is going to put up such a wall. Would this mean that Louisiana is going to start blocking such websites? What about VPNs and TOR? Are those tools going to be subject to censorship as well? At any rate, nothing about this means this will end well.
We all know how things worked out for the major record labels and movie studios when they declared war on file-sharing with lawsuits. The way things are going with all of this, one can only see similar results for those who declared war on porn. It’s just going to get much more difficult to stop people getting such content in the first place.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
