| Note that they do not object to age verification. They object to the specific way North Carolina is requiring it to be done: > Aylo has publicly supported age verification of users for years, but we believe that any law to this effect must preserve user safety and privacy, and must effectively protect children from accessing content intended for adults. > Unfortunately, the way many jurisdictions worldwide have chosen to implement age verification is ineffective, haphazard, and dangerous. Any regulations that require hundreds of thousands of adult sites to collect significant amounts of highly sensitive personal information is putting user safety in jeopardy. Moreover, as experience has demonstrated, unless properly enforced, users will simply access non-compliant sites or find other methods of evading these laws Using modern cryptographic techniques (such as blind signatures or zero-knowledge proofs) it is possible to design a system whereby you can prove your age to porn site P without P receiving any information they did not already have other than that you are older than their age threshold. In particular this would even work for anonymous users. There would be another site V involved in the verification. You would have to give V your real identity and show them your proof of age documents, but V would not get any information about what site you trying to get verified for. If V were a site that already has your real identity then using V for age verification would not be giving them anything that they didn't already have. It might be possible for someone who obtains records of both P and V to get an idea of the real identities of porn site account owners by trying to match up the timing. This risk can be greatly reduced by having just one or two V sites, so that they are high traffic, and by having some random delays in the verification protocol. That way someone trying to figure out if I was using say Pornhub might find out from V that I was doing the V side of a verification at say 2024-06-01 01:44:21, and they might be able to find out from Pornhub if they had any verifications using V that started within a few minutes before that and completed within a few minutes after that. But with only one or two V sites, there will be way more verifications that happened at V at times compatible with those Pornhub verifications. They would not be able to tell if mine at 2024-06-01 01:44:21 is one of those Pornhub ones or one of the many more going on around that time for other sites. It is a little counterintuitive, but the more sites that require age verification the better the privacy protection, and the fewer the number of V sites, the better the privacy protection. That suggests that if we are going to require some sites to do age verification, to do it in the most privacy preserving way (1) it should be done nationally rather than as a patchwork of state verification laws, and (2) V should be a government site. |