US States enforcing new age verification for adult content—how could this be done properly?
Seeing the news about Utah and Virginia over in the US, there’s been a lot of discourse about how unsafe it is to submit government ID online. Even the states that have their own age-verification portals are likely to introduce a lot of risk of leaks, phishing, and identity theft.
My interest, however, focused on this as an interesting technical and legislative problem. How _could_ a government impose age-verification control in a better way?
My first thought would be to legislate the inclusion of some sort of ISP-level middleware. Any time a user tried to access a site on the government provided list of adult content, they’d need to simply authenticate with their ISP web credentials.
Parents could give their children access to the internet at home or via cellular networks knowing this would block access to adult content and adults without children could login to their ISP portal and opt-out of this feature.
As much as I think these types of blocks aren’t particularly effective—kids will pretty quickly figure out how to use a VPN—I think a scheme like mine would be at least _as effective_ as the one the governments have mandated without adding any new risk to users.
What do you all think? Are any of you from these states or other regions where some sort of age-restriction is enforced? How does this work where you are from?
Edit:
Using a simple captive portal—just like the ones on public wifi—would probably be the simplest way to accomplish this. It’s relatively low friction to the end-user, most web browsers will deal with the redirect cleanly despite the TLS cert issues, and it requires no collection of any new PII.
Also, I don’t think these types of filters are useful or worth legislating, I’m just looking at ways to implement them without harming security or privacy.
Paper tokens: Produce 100 billion authentication tokens (could be passwords, could be private keys of signed certificates), print them on thick paper, fold them up, publicly stir them in giant vats at their central manufacturing location before distributing them to show that no record is being kept of where each token is being geographically routed to, and the have them freely available in giant buckets at any establishment that already does age-checks for any other reason (bars, grocery stores that sell alcohol or tobacco, etc.). The customer does the usual age-verification ritual, then reaches into the bucket and themselves randomly selects any reasonable number of paper tokens to take with them. It should be obvious to all parties that no record is being kept of which human took which token.
Require these tokens to be used for something besides porn access. Maybe for filing your taxes, opening bank accounts, voting, or online alcohol / tobacco purchases. This way, people requesting these tokens do not divulge that they are pornography viewers.