Louisiana is First State to Require Gov ID to Visit Adult Web Sites
A Louisiana law now makes it a crime for web sites serving content harmful to minors to install age verification technology, but only for users who are in Louisiana. The law became effective on January 1st.
The law says that any web site that intentionally publishes or distributes material harmful to minors shall be held liable if they don’t do age verification. The law says substantial is 33.3% or more of such harmful material.
In order to avoid confusion, the law explicitly lists all of the body parts that are harmful, including, well, I won’t list them here. It then goes on to list the acts that are also covered, in the same level of detail.
There is an exception for “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value”. You may remember that the Supremes said, several years ago, that they did not know how to define that, but they would know it when they saw it.
At least one adult website, Pornhub, is requiring age verification.
The millions of other adult websites are not doing so.
Pornhub has outsourced this age verification process to AllPassTrust, which is a company that I have never heard of and which is based in Cyprus. I suspect hackers are working on compromising them even as we speak.
While similar age verification proposals have been introduced in other countries, none are currently active.
In December, Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah introduced the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act and the Shielding Children’s Retinas for Egregious Exposure on the Net (SCREEN) Act that would require something similar at a national level.
Last August both Mastercard and Visa announced that they would stop serving the advertising network for Mindgeek’s (the parent of Pornhub) web sites after a district court judge denied Visa’s attempt to remove itself as a defendant in a case that alleges that Visa is liable for harms done to minors by visiting the web sites. This is similar to making bullet manufacturers liable for people using guns in crimes. Second Amendment fans love those type of laws.
In the case of the Louisiana law, I suspect that most people will just use a VPN instead of dealing with both the hassle and intrusion – and the need to trust a company in Cyprus with their data.
Assuming Mike Lee’s bills become law, then the VPN will have to connect to the Internet in other countries.
This is highly unlikely to be anything other than a very minor speedbump to the porn industry.
Credit: Vice
In looking at AllPassTrust’s privacy policy, which is very detailed, it talks about the data they collect, what they might use it for, who they might share it with and the fact that just because you delete your account does not mean that they will delete your data.
On the connection to AllPassTrust from Pornhub, they have a connection to the Louisiana driver’s license digital wallet. I am not sure how that works or what happens if you want to use an ID other than a Louisiana driver’s license. I also wonder if there will be a significant black market in stolen AllPassTrust login credentials.
Given that selling and serving up porn is a multi-billion dollar industry, I expect that this will get heated long before it is resolved, but that, no doubt, will take years.
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