This is exactly the opposite of the way public spaces actually work, and the way that public spaces actually work is the very justification for laws like this in the first place! You've just taken their exact rationale and imagined a world that would lead that metaphor to the opposite conclusion.

In most of the real-life US, you can't put porn on a billboard, you can't sell it in a supermarket, and you can't wear it on a shirt. You can't go out naked in public, and you can't engage in public sexual activity.

If you do want to buy porn or go into a strip club, you have to show ID and go into a distinctly-not-public space behind closed doors, often without street-facing windows lest people in the public space be able to see inside.

The fact that this is how public spaces work is why these laws are written the way that they are—by analogy to real public spaces vs real adults-only spaces.

This is the attitude that led us to this problem in the first place.

>Would you allow an 8 year old to wander New York City unattended?

They're at much higher risk of being arrested/abducted by the police than they are anything else. This is a uniquely North American neurosis; this happens every day in every other nation. They take the subway to work/school or walk, like everyone else.

As much as I kind of agree, I want to fight so much for open access to the internet because it was so useful to me as a child, thirsty for information and starving for nourishment.

I will say I think these laws are bonkers. Restrict what companies can do with child data, make it clear an account is a minors, that should be more than sufficient.

Now admittedly many of these things are unevenly enforced, but society absolutely does a lot in the physical world to make it appropriate for children.

Many people do, in fact, do this:

https://reason.com/2021/06/11/free-range-kids-second-edition...

No, but that just means NYC is a crappy place. I regularly see 8yr olds wandering Tokyo alone.

I would hope that the answer is yes.

This kind of reasoning (not to pick on the commenter above) is troubling. People blame cellphones and social media. But what are they going to do once they put down their cellphones, if not go out? Should they stare at the walls?

Interacting with strangers is a valuable experience. If we do not encourage children to interact with strangers, should we be surprised when they do not want to participate in civic activities as an adult?

Sure, why shouldn't 8 year olds wander a city unattended, and eg use public transport?

I cycled to school way younger than that. And so did many people in the past.

At age 8 I was wandering in Munich unattended.

But okay, gotta admit, this is Germany we're talking about, so not many issues with hordes of mentally ill and/or homeless people doing anything from drugs to defecating on the sidewalk right next to big tech's offices [1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/18/san-fr...

This is common in Japan.

- Kids should be in bed by 8.

- They shouldn't light fires in the back yard.

- They shouldn't run with knives.

If someone tried to use my support for those things as a basis for 24/7 surveillance of bedrooms, back yards and knife drawers, they'd be insane.

Web != internet.

Yes as long as they know to observe traffic and know how to use the subway.

Almost all child adductions are parental kidnappings. This "will nobody think of the children..." neurosis is just that, a neurosis.

https://www.404media.co/the-pornhub-empire-cbc-podcast/

I know you meant this as a rhetorical question but honestly, the answer should be yes.

And if the city is too dangerous for kids to live in it now, then fix that.

Likewise for the internet. Kids are going to use it, we should make sure it’s designed around that.

That doesn’t mean we need surveillance like this though.

I grew up on the uncensored internet, and it was fine, but I would not conflate the internet with a public space. From my experience the actions and content of the internet are very different from the real world.

This is a disgusting worldview. The fact that an 8-year-old can NOT walk NYC unattended is a disgrace. This is what civilized countries actually look like: https://youtu.be/IkVvXVDs5aI That American children cannot reasonably do the same any longer is a FAILURE of the public trust.

You might be surprised, but back in the day before overprotective parents, “free range kids” were a thing. I was riding my bike all over the city (albeit not New York) with friends and just told to be home by 8:00 with no cell phones. I was 10-11 years old.

Even in Atlanta where my wife grew up she was riding the public bus at 12 with her younger brother going to the mall.

Wrt. privacy, the real issue is that the small step helps the big step not just symbolically. ID-based age-verification, even when used for good reasons, gives the state and government access to its people’s history of age-restricted content. If this government decides to, say, prosecute anyone who viewed/bought/consumed (inane) X, it’s far easier vs. a government that doesn’t have age-verification. Both governments face major opposition, but the latter government’s opposition is more effective, because the former’s has already shared their history.

One thing the article doesn’t state but implies, that I don’t agree with, is: the slippery slope is still a fallacy, when a government first decides to age-gate reasonable X (e.g. porn) then unreasonable Y (e.g. history books). Because said government will receive almost as much opposition and people doing work-arounds for Y, as if they went straight to age-gating Y; although not exactly as much, I generally assume (and hope) the difference doesn't outweigh the benefits of "stepping towards the middle". In the article, X is porn, and Y is facial cream, dating apps, and diet pills. But these things arguably should be age-gated; and even the article’s talking points are not that these are OK for children, but that gating them gives the government data on more people (which is a real slippery-slope, not a fallacy, as explained in the above paragraph), specifically people who don’t watch porn (perhaps some of the readers don’t mind porn viewers being monitored because they aren’t one of them). If states were to actually start age-gating history books, I guarantee there would be serious opposition, including from people who are completely fine with age-gating porn.

Almost anything is possible, but even in this case it was never inevitable or inherently true that age verification for X meant age verification for Y. Which means the value - if any - for a slippery slope argument is "consider the possibilities X might open up"

Rhetorical arguments are more important than ever in the age of AI, because AI is our attempt to simulate that. Probabilistic AI mimics rhetoric (inexpertly). It uses past knowledge to predict future behavior (rather, just the next token) based on probability.

To be clear - I'm not arguing that logical argument aren't important; I am a logical person, and prefer logical arguments to rhetorical ones. I prefer the certainty. I still recognize the need for rhetoric. Not everything is certain, and you have to make decisions based on probabilities and unknowns.

Also, neither deductive nor informal fallacies mean that the conclusion of an argument is wrong, in any case, so the conclusion of an argument being right does not disprove (or even provide strong counterevidence) that the argument contained a fallacy. Fallacies are about whether and to what degree a conclusion is supported by the reasoning (and evidence, in the case of informal fallacies) offered to support it, not about whether or not it is true.

The correct flow for preserving anonymity is: the requesting party issues a challenge token to the user -- the token header describes the type of request (>=18yo?) and the token body is completely random(). The user then takes this token and has the challenge verified (signed) on their side, the signed token is then returned to the requester.

This way the state never knows the identity of the challenge issuer.

() Note that this scheme requires good faith on the part of the challenge issuer that the token body is actually random, although it would seem that a simple DH-key mechanism would patch this vulnerability.

You'd know the state they're a legal resident of as they use state-specific keys used for signatures.

If the request allows checking arbitrary ages like Apple's, then you can get their age with a handful of requests. If one has to verify every visit, then you can get exact birthdate eventually.

If the one verifying has to pass data to the verifier site or the request to the verifier has any site/app/company-specific IDs (again, Apple), then you're leaking what you're visiting to the verifier.

And not to beat a dead horse, but as long as there are jurisdictions that don't require age verification in the world, children can easily use a free VPN or proxy to avoid checks altogether at which point, one has to ask, why do it at all?

https://apnews.com/article/utah-app-store-age-verification-7...

https://le.utah.gov/~2025/bills/static/SB0142.html

With an eID card, if it's just saying "yes, this person is old enough" then any teen can swipe a device with an eID card and start using it.

However, there’s also been a rise in reports in kids damaging their skin by using these products in the first place or using them wrongly (vitamin A and AHA are amazing but they are very tricky to handle and can easily lead to chemical burns / retinol burns …).

I don’t think there’s any good reason to let kids handle those on their own. And stuff like retinol is starting to get regulated for “everyone” anyway.

My understanding is they’re harmful if misused.

Lately, a new law just passed to force porn websites to check the age of visitors. I would have been fine with an authentication going through France Connect:

- the gov knows which website you went to, just like your DNS provider would, but it doesn't which content - and the website knows which content you've watched but not who's watching.

Best of both worlds!

But no, we have to send a copy of our ID card to the website, which is INSANE because the website knows WHO you are and WHAT you're watching.

Right?

All of a sudden, the internet is incapable of tracking me with that much fidelity. They don't know how old I am. Discord knows how old I am. I never told them my birthday.

This gets a big "hrrrrrrr. Durrrrrrr." From me.

/s/s

Agreed.

>I think, slowly, the world is starting to realize this.

Unlikely. You'd be surprised at the proportion of parents that want to outsource parenting to the govt.

Agree.

> parents should be able to access a (password protected) setting in any browser that can exclude some types of websites (like porn).

How would this work? Who's going to set up the taxonomy / classification tree for every domain/site on the internet just so a guardian can say "yes to drugs, no to porn, no to news, no to weapons..."?

Or if that's not the implementation, how would an arbitrary site signal to the browser what the age limit is? Once you move beyond a binary "require parent consent for $domain" flag, you're quickly approaching traditional parental control software.

I know I'm not the only one one this site that made a bit of spare $ back in the day helping kids at school go _around_ overbearing parental controls.

Benefits:

1. Orwellian abuse: No creepy-ass super-abuseable government panopticon knowing every goddamn service you've ever made an account on, with the ability to arbitrarily revoke them and/or block new ones.

2. Costs: The majority of the costs of creating and maintaining the system fall upon the people who actually use it and want it to exist, rather than a bunch of other adults across the globe.

3. Parent focus: Most enforcement exists in a physical realm where parents/guardians at least have a chance of understanding, monitoring, and managing it. "Little Timmy is using Daddy's phone" can be determined instantly at a glance.

4. Exceptions: If the child has some health-class homework and can't access the right Wikipedia pages anymore, the parent can easily grant exceptions and revoke them.

5. If someone's religion says that unclad ankles are smut, then their church can create their own site-rating-site and adherents configure their family's devices to it.

As always, parenting starts and stops with the parent. The internet should be open and if the child sees something that upsets them (or makes them question one of their assumptions), it's the parent's responsibility to cultivate an environment where the child feels comfortable talking about it with them.

It's about the only place it might have the intended effect anyway, and has the advantage of not enabling mass surveillance.

The data already exists, it's what bars use to scan IDs with handheld readers IIRC.

You want a mandated block of government code in every browser?

1. Me from sharing my credentials with everyone by publicly publishing them.

2. The third party from connecting with any service providers requiring verification to share info?

If the only porn requires this, then the third party has a record of every single person who wants to view porn.

And the precision of one year is way too low.

And the reality is as always it's focusing on the wrong "threat". Like the vast majority of sexual abuse is by trusted people in the kid's life, not by anything on the web. The real threats on the web are social media and chat rooms, not the "naughty" stuff.

Or look at the perennial attempts to allow governments to block "child sexual abuse images"--since it's always done with hashes there's no verification that that's all they're doing. Think China wouldn't block images of tank man in Tienanmen Square?

And we don't even have to speculate anymore what they are because the plan is out in the open. So when someone shows up with what is ostensibly a non-problem in the real world but the solution to which happens to be the legal tool they need for this other less popular worse thing they've loudly said they want I think it's normal and intellectually honest for that to be the analysis. "The EFF doesn't care about child safety" is exactly what they wanted you to say to dismiss any reasoned opposition.

[1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/porn-passes-...

We can do better with zero-knowledge-proof-based schemes, which also allow securely decoupling issuance/certification from online verification.

E.g. https://linc.cnil.fr/en/demonstration-privacy-preserving-age...

What if you're borth on March 1st and it's currently February 29, 18 years later?

Data brokers. But that data isn't exactly accurate. Relatively over the large population yes. Accurate for identifying indivdual users: no.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_network

Texas' law, H.B. 1181, requires people visiting porn websites to prove their age by either uploading government-issued identification or a "commercially reasonable method" such as bank information. More than a dozen other states have passed similar bills, though they are all on hold pending what the Supreme Court decides.

> When I go to pornhub I have to click a button that days I’m 18.

if you were in Texas, it'd be not reachable at all [0]. this is due to a bill [1] that would have required Pornhub to use the more intrusive age-verification options. it also allows for significant fines for non-compliance. if a 16 year old kid used their 19 year old brother's ID to get through the verification, Pornhub could potentially be liable for up to $250k. and the broadest reading of that bill would mean that quarter-million fine applies every time a minor bypassed the age-verification check.

0: https://www.texastribune.org/2024/03/14/texas-pornhub-5th-ci...

1: https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/88R/billtext/html/HB01181F...

That said, as a parent to teenagers, I don't know that I believe that age verification is such a terrible idea. The reality is that there's a lot of fucked up porn out there and blocking it effectively across all networks and every device is non-trivial. I understand this is a minority viewpoint on HN.

Of course I have absolutely no interest in uploading scans of my drivers license to porn sites so I don't know what the right answer is. I'm sure there's some cryptographic scheme whereby a 3rd party could verify my identity without knowing for what purpose and then the porn sites could validate that verification without disclosing who or what I'm doing. I dunno.

Louisiana, AFAIK Does not require age verification, but all of our traffic goes to Dallas, so we get lumped in with Texas.

if you did check the other two, you'd notice that they're much more restrictive.

from the NY bill, apologies for the all-caps but it's in the original [0]:

> "IDENTITY VERIFICATION" SHALL MEAN THE USE OF AN ON-DEMAND SELF-PHOTOGRAPH TO VERIFY THE OWNERSHIP OF A PERSON'S GOVERNMENT-ISSUED IDENTIFICATION;

> "LICENSE VERIFICATION" SHALL MEAN THE USE OF TECHNOLOGY TO VERIFY A PERSON'S GOVERNMENT-ISSUED IDENTIFICATION;

and the one in WA [1]:

> For the purposes of this section, proof of legal age includes any of the following officially issued identification that shows the purchaser's age and bears the purchaser's signature and photograph:

0: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/A3323

1 (PDF): https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2025-26/Pdf/Bills/Se...

Like what public interest is served by having a date of birth entry or a checkbox for 'verifying' age?

To me it serves no public interest as it's functionally useless and it will only serve as a thin end of a wedge to normalize more egregious requirements.

To be clear: I'm strongly against any laws that require uploading government ID to sketchy websites, but at least 2 out of the 3 examples listed are not this.

Where's the stuff that isn't a smoke screen?

Huh.

You can't block technology though. Government or not. People find a way.