The War on Porn Regular Updates about the Assault on The Adult Industry
As a guy who crossed the magic line of his 18th birthday over 35 years ago, it has been a damn long time since I was last asked to present identification documents as part of purchasing any age-restricted product.
More accurately, I should say it had been a damn long time – until last week, when I tried to log in to the members area of an porn website of which I’ve been a member for several months now.
Rather than simply being prompted to enter my username and password, I was presented with a dialog box informing me that before I could gain access to the site in question – a site to which I’ve already prepaid for nearly 90 more days of access, by virtue of a billing rollover that took place weeks ago – I needed to verify my age.
This struck me as odd and more than a little irritating. I was aware my home state is among those that have passed an age verification law directed at porn websites, but I had assumed existing customers, particularly those whose credit cards had been successfully billed several times already by the merchant involved, might somehow be “grandfathered in,” at least with respect to members’ area access.
No such luck, though. If I wanted to continue to access this site – in other words, if I wanted to receive the full benefit of the membership I’d already paid for – I would have to do business with whatever third-party service they’ve employed to perform the act of age verification on the site’s behalf, as well.
My immediate reaction was to close the browser, so I could weigh the question of whether to continue as a member of the site, cancel my account, or cancel my account and demand a refund. Nowhere in the agreement I ‘signed’ as part of joining the site did it state I’d have to do business with a third party to maintain future access to the site. Foisting that requirement on me without notice seemed dicey.
The first decision I made was not to act at all, right then. Among other things, the unexpected access-block had pissed me off a bit, and anger is never a good frame of mind for making decisions. I joined the site because I like the content they make and because I like watching it; should requiring me to show my ID really be so off-putting as to make me cancel, let alone demand a refund?
I sat on the decision for a couple days, straddling the fence on whether I’d jump through the age verification hoop that had been presented to me. Finally, I decided it made sense to see what the process required, how invasive it was of my privacy – and how effective or ineffective it seemed towards the stated end goal of verifying the users’ age and deterring minors from accessing the site. I could always back out before submitting anything, I reckoned.
The site in question offered only one option for an age verification service, one based in the United Kingdom. The system informed me that to verify my age, I’d need to upload a scan of one of several state-issued forms of ID: a driver’s license, a state ID, a passport, or state-issued military ID. It also referenced the possibility of uploading a selfie, in which I’d be holding the ID – so my face could be compared to that on the ID, presumably.
I wasn’t thrilled about doing any of this, for a variety of reasons. For starters, I don’t trust the promises from these third parties to not retain any of my “personally identifiable information.” I believe most online companies will look for every means available to monetize any piece of data they collect on their users (and seek every loophole in every law preventing them from doing so), and my assumption is that companies offering age verification services will be no different from their peers in that regard. And if such companies collect and store this data, malicious hackers will access it eventually, rest assured.
Beyond privacy concerns, I kept thinking about the lack of notice involved here. One day I’m a member of a porn site who can log in any time and check out the latest updates, then the next day, I’m forced to hand over my name, contact information and ID to some company out of the UK, just for the honor of accessing content I’d already paid to access? Even if that’s not an illegal or tortious arrangement, such a transition certainly doesn’t feel right.
Ultimately, despite my reservations, I decided to go ahead with the age verification process. As much as anything, I was now curious to see just how onerous it was and what all it would require of me.
A funny thing happened though; after uploading a photo of my ID, I was told I’d been verified and could now continue to the members area – no selfie required, no further personal information, just the email address I’d already given them on the previous page of the form and the scan of my ID.
Maybe I should be pleased by the fact I didn’t have to upload a selfie, but instead I’m struck by the pointlessness of it all. All this service had done was verify that someone had uploaded a driver’s license belonging to a man in his 50s, but in no way had they established it was the man in his 50s himself who had uploaded it.
The good news, I suppose, is that now I have access to the content for which I’d already paid. The bad news is… well, the bad news is unknowable, really. But when the bad news comes, with it may come answers to several questions I now have.
How many members of this same site will opt to cancel their memberships, or demand refunds, as I considered doing, rather than go through with the age verification process?
How many minors will find out about how easy it is to circumvent the age verification process of this age verification vendor?
Is this vendor truly not storing age verification documents? If they are storing such documents, will I learn that’s the case via an extortionate email threatening to reveal my porn preferences to my employer or family members?
But the biggest question, at least as I sit here right now typing, is this one: Through this age verification process, what was “verified,” exactly?
Exactly. I don’t know, either.
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