There are various ways in which age verification can be done without sacrificing privacy. Sadly, that requires standardised digital ID combined with several privacy preserving technologies that I've only seen used experimentally (I think Yivi comes closest, but its protocol involves sending identifiers between their servers and the consuming service, and requires services to be registered rather than arbitrarily accessible).

In its core, these protocols use digitally signed attributes (could be "SSN" or "birthday", but more practically this could also just be "is over 18"). With this system, you can simply transmit the token that says "I'm an adult", the website verifies this, and you're done. To prevent abuse through infinite reuse, these apps need to be verified occasionally, and the secrets must not be stored somewhere they can be copied from easily, but phones have solved that problem ages ago.

Unfortunately, I don't think governments who support these restrictions will also invest into these technologies. Perhaps efforts such as eIDAS will allow for some kind of non-profit to create and generate these tokens based on your standard digital government ID, but as of now, there's nothing.

Any technology can be bypassed by kids (just steal dad's porn pass!), so there's a limit to how effective age gates are. On the other hand, anything that requires stealing stealing devices protected with a PIN will be sufficient in most cases.

It won't work. Ever. VPN's free and paid exist, File sharing exists, Torrents exist, AI pornography generators exist, freenet, tor, I2P all exist. There is no action a government could take that would have any true impact in this regard unless they made the use of the internet illegal, and even at that, it would create a black market in which such things could still be purchased as physical media.

All this does is allow government entities to infringe on privacy rights further by doing what they have always done - hiding behind children.

I am in favor of stricter age verification for certain content. Not only for porn but also dating apps, social media, online shops, etc. But the current methods of age verification are a privacy nightmare and go well beyond what is reasonable. Especially since companies can't be trusted to not do bad stuff with that information.

What is necessary is a double anonymity age verification service. Ideally run by a company that by law is required to be very transparent. That way we don't have to provide personal information to companies that have no actual need for it but can still reduce the amount of minors getting into places they shouldn't be.

Yes, it won't be perfect, yes there will always be bad actors, but it will still do more good than harm.

I personally am open for a discussion about reducing the minimum age to view porn. I don't have strong feelings either way.

Absolute waste of tax money and resources, anyone advocating for this policy is an idiot and psychotic control freak that should never be allowed to opine on public policy.

Outdated values are driving this country back into the stone age. The body was designed to be horny as we go through teenage years. It's nature. Rather than guide kids on the safe path, fools would forbid, outlaw, prohibit until they can't control them after age of 18.

Here's how this plays out... Kids are going to masturbate, regardless. They will dive deeper into the Internet into places with no restrictions and be exposed to really messed up stuff. Hey at least the parent can pat themselves on the back, right, they were good partners that did everything right by the book, even paying the kid's therapist.

I don't think about it except I canmt wait till one of its non-corporate authors gets into FO(finding out) tyme ;)

I think its the regulatory body's responsibility to provide a safe and secure service that can verify age requirements if they want to force that.

If they can't provide that service, they shouldn't require it, especially with such sensitive information.