Porn sites try different tacks to wriggle out of US age assurance obligation

The most popular network of pornography sites on the internet is blocking access by users in five more states as the push and pull between online age verification advocates and pornographers widens.

Pornhub and its affiliated websites will block users from Indiana, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, and Nebraska over age assurance requirements, citing concern for the privacy of their users, The Verge reports. The sites have already been blocked in seven other states.

The states require users to upload ID documents or use a third-party age assurance provider using facial age estimation, but The Verge follows Pornhub in skipping over the latter option. Third-party providers could use biometric facial age estimation to gain reasonable assurance of users’ ages without storing their personal information.

Enter the courts

Pornography and other digital platforms have an ally in a federal U.S. judge who ruled on Monday that Mississippi’s age verification law represents an unconstitutional limit on access to online speech, The Washington Post reports.

Mississippi’s law is supposed to protect children from grooming by online predators, but has been criticized for being overly broad, leading to a lawsuit by NetChoice.

State Attorney General Lynn Fitch argued that the bill limited only “non-expressive conduct,” but U.S. District Judge Sul Ozerden rejected that interpretation.

Texas will have to defend its HB 1181 to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has decided to take on a challenge from a “Free Speech Coalition” on constitutional grounds.

Law360 reports that the Supreme Court has already declined to stay an appeals court decision which keeps the law in place pending the outcome of the legal challenge.

Can’t someone else do it?

Meanwhile in California, the Age Verification Provider’s Association (AVPA) expects the State Senate Judiciary Committee to accept an amendment to the state’s age verification law as soon as Tuesday which the advocacy group says would render the law meaningless.

AB 3080 passed the state assembly unanimously, but now an amendment from the pornography industry that limits adult sites’ obligations to blocking “users designated as minors by the operating system of the device.” Since designating the legal age status of users is not a central or even peripheral function of operating systems, the AVPA argues in LinkedIn post that the amendment would shift obligation for performing age verification to “no legal entity.”

An editorial in Cybernews suggests that device-based age verification could potentially work, but carries several security risks of its own.

Article Topics

age verification  |  AVPA  |  biometrics  |  children  |  face biometrics  |  lawsuits  |  legislation  |  social media  |  United States